


between me & you [i've been worried about the future]

by qqueenofhades



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: (well sort of), F/M, Fake Marriage, Garcia Flynn Human Disaster, Things Backfire Hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-10-16 13:17:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10572087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qqueenofhades/pseuds/qqueenofhades
Summary: All three of the men stare at Lucy, gobsmacked, while she stares back at them, just as baffled. It’s difficult to say who is less able to process this. “What?” she says, when the silence threatens to turn hideous. “Am I not allowed to kiss my husband after he gets back from a dangerous trip?”“Hus – ?” Rufus looks horrified.“HUS – ?” Horrified is not even enough of a word for Wyatt.“H – " Flynn looks as if he’s just been hit over the head with a baseball bat.(Or: Flynn, Wyatt, and Rufus return from a jump to discover that they have inadvertently changed things, resulting in Flynn and Lucy somehow being married. Nobody is more aghast about this than Flynn. Numerous complications ensue.)





	1. Chapter 1

The Lifeboat spins and sighs and rattles to a halt, spitting bolts, as Rufus white-knuckles it down like a pilot landing a 747 in hurricane-force crosswinds. Not one of his more picturesque arrivals, perhaps, but then, they’re lucky to have made it, seeing as their departure from 1914 Sarajevo occurred amidst heavy gunfire, Franz Ferdinand’s bodyguards convinced that they were responsible for shooting the archduke (nobody’s figured out what Rittenhouse did to Gavrilo Princip, but it can’t be good). This trip, moreover, was just Flynn, Wyatt, and Rufus. They were warned that if Lucy was even spotted in the city, well… Princip’s unknown fate would probably be a basket of cherries in comparison. They all felt naked traveling without their historian, but none of them were willing to take chances with her safety, and the Lifeboat has been balky recently anyway, fighting Rufus’ modifications to allow for its new four-person crew. So Lucy stayed. Hopefully got a manicure and a coffee, stroll in the park, while Flynn and Wyatt (and for that matter, Rufus) were shooting at Black Hand anarchists right before the outbreak of WWI. You know. Relaxing off-day.

The instant they’ve stopped moving, Flynn and Wyatt undo their crash webbing and stagger woozily out of the Lifeboat, while Rufus is still swearing at the console. Lucy has in fact been waiting for them, and at this, she runs toward them, pale-faced with relief. “God, that was awful. I never want to do that again. Next time, I don’t care what Rittenhouse says, I’m coming.” 

As Wyatt is turning to her, clearly expecting a hug, she hurries past him and throws herself into Flynn’s arms instead. Flynn is far more nonplussed than either of them, staring down at her as if she’s suddenly turned radioactive, arms held awkwardly akimbo. She likes him, sure (probably the most of the team) but this tearful, emotional embrace is certainly new. “Lucy…?”

Lucy reaches up and cups his face in her hands, then kisses him, which succeeds in, much like the malfunctioning Lifeboat, blowing Flynn’s circuits altogether. He splutters. (So does Wyatt.) It’s clear both of them think they’ve gone insane, just as Rufus emerges and blinks hard. “Excuse me?” he demands. “Is there something I’m missing here?”

“I appear to be missing it too,” Wyatt says narrowly, glaring at Flynn.

“Well, that wouldn’t be surprising, would it?” Flynn shoots back, even as it’s clear that he also would like to know exactly what’s going on. All three of the men stare at Lucy, gobsmacked, while she stares back at them, just as baffled. It’s difficult to say who is less able to process this.

“What?” she says, when the silence threatens to turn hideous. “Am I not allowed to kiss my husband after he gets back from a dangerous trip?”

“Hus – ?” Rufus looks horrified.

“HUS – ?” _Horrified_ is not even enough of a word for Wyatt.

“H – “ Flynn looks as if he’s just been hit over the head with a baseball bat. He rubs his mouth, turning away, as they notice that there does appear to be some sort of a ring on Lucy’s finger. She broke things off with her fake fiance, yes, but nobody, to say the least, has seen this coming. Wyatt and Rufus exchange _did she really just say that?_ looks. Flynn remains rooted to the spot.

Lucy frowns. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she says slowly. “But am I getting the sense that this… wasn’t the case before you left?”

“Of course it wasn’t the case!” Flynn wheels around, wild-eyed. “We’re not _married,_ Lucy!”

Lucy’s frown deepens, as if to say that they’ll have to agree to disagree about that. “Garcia,” she says quietly. Just that. Saying that she’ll accept it if he’s insistent about it, since she knows a little too much about returning to a reality that has pulled the rug out from under you, but that it’ll hurt her if he does. Almost more than she thinks she can possibly stand.

“You know,” Rufus says. “I always figured if anyone, it would be Wyatt that you’d wind up accidentally married to. _Flynn?_ Talk about a downgrade.”

Wyatt doesn’t say anything, but it’s clear from the look on his face that he also thought this. So, for that matter, does Flynn. He looks down at his hand, the wedding ring he still wears, then back at Lucy, as if wondering if this is some kind of cruel prank. Opens and shuts his mouth. Can’t come up with anything. Yes, Sarajevo, it’s about where he might have family roots, where they could have changed something, set a ball rolling for him to end up marrying Lucy instead of –

He goes motionless all over, frozen, as if wondering if Lorena and Iris still exist in this timeline, or if he has somehow, unwittingly betrayed them by altering reality beyond any possible retrieval, ended up married (married!) to another woman instead. Even her. Even Lucy. 

He starts to open his mouth, perhaps to ask if she is his first wife. Decides he does not, _cannot_ bear to hear the answer. Instead he stares at her, still rather wildly, then whirls on his heel. Doesn’t say a word.

Only runs.

* * *

“So,” Rufus says, a succinct and grim summary of the whole godforsaken situation. “Not one of our better evenings?”

There’s a growl from one side of him, where Wyatt is deep into his third beer, and on the other, Lucy looks sympathetic to their confusion but still insistent, twisting her wedding ring around on her finger. “How can you – “ she begins, then stops. The byzantine and inexplicable nature of time travel might be something they just have to live with, rather literally, but this still seems to demand an explanation. “How can you just… not remember this happening?”

“If you’re going to fill us in on the details, whirlwind romance and wedding and whatever else, believe me, I’d rather not know.” Wyatt lifts his beer to his lips again. “Why couldn’t we have something _useful_ happen, like, say, Rittenhouse gets their stock price wiped out and can’t recruit more multi-millionaires to its evil cabal? Not you being married to fucking _Flynn.”_

Lucy looks down. “You understood when it happened.”

Wyatt laughs bitterly. “Yeah. Okay. Do I even want to ask how long it’s been?”

“Six – six months.”

“Oh, so you’re newlyweds.” Wyatt considers his beer, then polishes it off at a go. “I suppose this is the part where I say mazel tov?”

“We can’t have changed things that much,” Rufus says. “She still knows us, we’re still a team, we’re still fighting Rittenhouse. All that altered was – “

“Yeah. She’s Mrs. Garcia Flynn. Got it. Thanks, buddy.” Wyatt looks as if he is still far too sober to be having this conversation. “There isn’t some kind of what, undo button?”

“We know there’s not.” Lucy takes a drink of her own beer, checking her phone by reflex. She doesn’t know why she’d, oh, expect her husband to text her after he ran out of here and hasn’t been seen for hours, except for the fact that they really don’t seem to remember. “And I – and we – “

“You’re what?” Wyatt says bleakly. “Happy?”

Lucy looks at him for a long moment. Doesn’t know what to say, what to explain, when her most pertinent memory is of him telling her reluctantly that if it makes her happy, if it’s really what she wants, then he’ll support her, wish them well – as long as she’s sure. She reaches to put a hand over his, but he pulls it away.

“Wyatt,” she says softly. “Please.”

A muscle works in his jaw, but he doesn’t answer. Rufus looks as if he’d rather not be here, but takes a gulp of his own beer, in solidarity. “Why don’t you, uh,” he says to Lucy. “Why don’t you check on the Lifeboat?”

It is blindingly obvious that if anyone should be checking on the Lifeboat, it’s Rufus, but Lucy is also well aware of what he’s actually asking. She pauses, then nods and gets up, letting herself out and crossing the dark courtyard to the warehouse. Performs a perfunctory check or two, and is just about to see if she can sleep when a shadow moves by the door.

She tenses briefly, thinking their safe house might have been discovered, ready to shout for the others, but it turns familiar in a moment. She lets out a shuddering breath of relief, starts toward him, even as she reminds herself, again, that he doesn’t know. “Hey,” she says quietly. “Glad you’re back.”

Flynn doesn’t answer, staring up at the dark silhouette of the Lifeboat with much the same expression as Wyatt. He would clearly rather pretend not to have heard her, as a fist clenches briefly, and he presses it flat on the bullet-pocked metal hide of the machine that keeps twisting their lives around, over and over, to which they are inextricably bound so long as Rittenhouse has the other one. At last he says abruptly, “Did you – did you know them?”

“What?” Lucy halts, a few paces distant. Doesn’t want him to think she’s crowding him, forcing him, but also desperate to know just what might have somehow burned. “Did I know who?”

“Lorena.” His face is half in darkness, expressionless. “And Iris.”

“Your… first wife? And your daughter?” Lucy doesn’t know quite why he’s asking, but enough not to question. She nods cautiously. “Yes, I know about them. You… you told me a lot about them, on our… on our wedding night. We just talked, Garcia.” Her cheeks heat. “Mostly.”

He flinches somewhat at the sound of his first name, yet again, too strange, too familiar. “So they existed?” he demands. “They still existed?”

“Yeah.” Lucy tilts her head back to look into his haunted eyes. Her voice is quiet. “They existed.”

He flinches again. As if it is unfathomable to him how he could have known that, how he could ever have moved on, how he could finally have laid those ghosts to rest and chosen to start a new life instead, with a living wife, the hope of another family sometime in the future. It is utterly unimaginable. She wants to tell him that he – that a version of him, at least – was able to make that choice, and live with it, and to almost be happy. To never forget the past, to never stop loving and honoring and missing what was gone, but to think at last about what was present. To live for that instead. To allow yourself.

She wants to tell him how it was like nothing she’d ever seen in her life, when he smiled and put the ring on her finger.

But this Garcia Flynn doesn’t understand.

It’s not clear if he ever will.

He was cheated of it, of that choice, Lucy knows. Somehow stuck with her instead, when even if it might have been what he subconsciously wanted, he never had any control or memory of getting there. They’re not standing far apart now, and she raises a hand, intending to brush his cheek, but he tenses. “Don’t,” he says. “Please.”

She hesitates, then lowers it. “All right,” she whispers. “Okay.”

They look at each other for a long moment more. She has missed Amy for so long, her absence, her lack, her loss. She has never known until just now how much it is possible to miss someone standing right in front of you. She’s not sure which is worse.

“Go to sleep.” Flynn turns back to the Lifeboat. There’s a toolbox open on the bench next to him. He clearly intends to spend the night tinkering. “Go.”

“Garcia – “

“Go, Lucy.” His voice doesn’t change inflection, is almost gentle, but she can still hear the door shutting in it. “If you would.”

After a long moment, she nods. Turns correctly on her heel. Does as he asks, does not look back, and leaves.

* * *

Things do not improve over the next few weeks. They don’t manage to stop Rittenhouse from infiltrating the Manhattan Project ( _those_ people with a nuclear bomb… that’s not terrifying at _all)_ and nor do they prevent them from planting operatives among the French Revolution and Maximilien Robespierre to make the Terror even more, well, terrible. Part of this could be explained by the fact that Flynn barely seems to be able to stand being in the same room as Lucy for long, much less talk to her. They’re quickly discovering that as dysfunctional as their little crew might be, four mortals against the full might and fury of Rittenhouse unleashed, it’s completely dead in the water without Flynn, and without Flynn and Lucy clicking the way they used to. They are getting _slaughtered_ out there, and every defeat makes it less likely they’ll be able to pull out a victory the next time. No matter what this is, it has to stop.

It’s Wyatt, finally, who decides to express that opinion to Flynn. Express it forcefully, in fact, when they’ve gotten back with the smoke of the Great Chicago Fire still heavy and stinking in their clothes (between 1893, 1931, and now 1871, nothing good _ever_ happens when they go to Chicago). As they’re unbuckling in grim silence, he grabs Flynn by the arm. “Hey. How about you get the fuck over yourself, and wake up?”

Flynn looks at him with slitted eyes. “And you’re the one to tell me to do that, are you?”

“Guys.” Rufus, sensing trouble, prepares to play referee, a role he has been forced into rather too often. “Cork it.”

“I will if he does,” Wyatt snarls. “But that might take away time from treating Lucy like crap and being Rittenhouse’s biggest help in taking over the world, the way you’re acting! I thought you _cared_ about stopping these pricks! Not just your own wounded pride! Then again. Not too surprising I was wrong. Nobody’s ever thought, _Hey, that sure was a great decision_ , whenever they give you a chance!”

Flynn’s eyes go molten. He rips off his jacket, clearly preparing to go mano-a-mano, as Wyatt does the same, they circle each other, and then lunge, fists flying crazily, as Rufus and Lucy yell at them to stop. They pay absolutely no attention, whaling out the days and weeks and months of accumulated frustration, until Lucy throws herself bodily between them, arms spread. “ENOUGH!” she screams. “BOTH OF YOU! STOP!”

Flynn and Wyatt break off only grudgingly, a lock of dark hair hanging in Flynn’s bruised face and blood running from Wyatt’s split lip, eyeing each other absolutely murderously but unable to carry on with their brawl while Lucy is in the way. She regards both of them like a disapproving schoolteacher, lips set and grim. “Enough,” she repeats. “I’m sick of both of you acting this way about me. If it’s so much that neither of you can stand it, quit. Go do something else. Rufus and I will carry on without you, since we’re the only ones who, in fact, seem able to focus on the mission, and not our wounded male egos.”

Both men have the decency to flinch. Wyatt looks shamefaced. Flynn chews his cheek with a mutinous expression that, nonetheless, is somewhat abashed. They shuffle their feet as Lucy continues to glare at them. Rufus steps up behind her. “Don’t look at me,” he says. “I’m with her.”

“We are,” Lucy goes on, when neither of the culprits make any move to speak, “a _team._ We need both of you. You know Rufus and I can’t fight the way you can. We need our soldiers. We need our teammates. And both of you have been so blind, so caught up, so selfish, that you – “ She stops. “You’ve abandoned us. That’s what it feels like. Over _me,_ and I’m not worth that. Not with what we’re up against. I thought you knew that. I guess I was wrong.”

Wyatt and Flynn both wince again at that. Wyatt looks up at her imploringly. “Lucy – “

“Lucy – ” Flynn says at the same time. 

“I’m not interested in hearing it.” Slowly, as if she can’t stand to do this but it’s the only way she can think of to make either of them see reason, Lucy reaches up, and pulls her wedding ring off her left hand. Then the engagement band, throwing them both on the floor. “There,” she says quietly, savagely. “Maybe we have a chance of stopping Rittenhouse next time. I’d hope so, at least. Rufus, come on. Let’s get something to eat.”

With that, and one final, agonized look at the rings, she turns around smartly and takes his arm, as Rufus hesitates, then walks her off. The silence after their departure remains thunderous. Wyatt and Flynn don’t know quite what to say or do. Both of them are thoroughly reproached, but not in a hurry to be the first to offer apologies or conciliation.

Wyatt notices Flynn staring at the rings, though. As if he can’t quite look away, as if it’s rattled him in a way he never expected or wanted to see Lucy throw them down like that. Wyatt is still angry himself, but rattled too, and ashamed, and sad. At last, he steps forward, picks them up, and holds them out to Flynn. “Here,” he says quietly. “For safekeeping.”

Flynn looks at him for a long moment. Then he silently takes the rings, puts them in his pocket, and goes to retrieve his discarded jacket, as Wyatt does likewise. It doesn’t feel like the thing to do to join the other two for supper.

Wyatt clears his throat. “Drink?”

Flynn pauses once more. Then he nods. “Yes,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Yes, I think that’s a good idea.”


	2. Chapter 2

The team doesn’t exactly go out for nights on the town anymore, even when they’re home, what with the whole have-to-avoid-Rittenhouse thing they are struggling to pull off. Jiya visits with supplies and so forth, but she can’t risk being seen too often or in the same place, which has been hard on her and Rufus. Still, though. Tonight feels like it justifies an exception. They’re obviously not about to stroll into a bar and get nabbed like idiots, but there are a few places where they can go when they need a drink on the down-low, and one of those is where Flynn and Wyatt are currently sitting, not talking much, just trying to get a sufficient quantity of booze into their system to make it even possible. Both of them are still banged up from their scuffle, and Wyatt’s split lip stings from the alcohol. Not that this stops him. He takes another pull.

The bartender leaves them alone, as the people who come in here usually do for similar bottom-of-the-barrel reasons, and they both have their guns, so Wyatt figures they’re safe enough, for now. At last, quietly, he says, “You know she’s right. She usually is. We gotta cut this out.”

Flynn grunts noncommittally. As if to remark that of course, Wyatt needs to stop what _he’s_ doing, but it’s less clear that he himself intends to.

“It’s just one of those…” Wyatt traces the scarred wood of the bar. “Fluke things. It’s nobody’s fault. I guess I have to stop feeling like…” He trails off. Finally, “That if anyone, I would be the one entitled to that accident.”

“Believe me, I didn’t ask for it either.” Flynn glances at him sidelong, in what can almost be interpreted as a peace offering. If you squint. “And if it happened to you, are you really going to sit there and tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing? I know you, Wyatt. I know we’re more alike than you want to admit. And you went through the same thing. With _your_ wife.”

“I… yeah. Yeah, I did.” Wyatt blows out a breath. “I’d wonder if I was dishonoring Jessica, if I’d been cheated, if I’d ended up with something I wanted but in the worst possible way. Like of course I couldn’t earn it properly, that I…” He stops, struggling over the words. “That I’d lost whatever I had before, sacrificed it, burned it, and no future was worth that.”

“Yes.” Flynn’s voice is very quiet, barely a whisper. “Yes, that’s about it.”

“Hey.” Wyatt reaches out, puts a hand on his shoulder. “I stole a time machine trying to save my wife too. And I did that because you told me the name of the guy. I don’t know why it didn’t bring Jessica back, I don’t know what happened, but…” He pauses. “Thank you. For at least giving me the chance. I was the one who screwed it up.”

Flynn looks as startled as if a hunter approached an animal in the woods and wanted to chat, rather than whipping out a high-caliber rifle and turning it into a pelt. After a moment he says, “I’m not sure you can thank me for that. I was trying to divide you, distract you, keep you off my tail so you wouldn’t interfere any more. But I did think it would work. That you’d have her back. And that if it succeeded for you, I’d know it would for me.”

“Go figure.” Wyatt grins bitterly. “Guess we’re both just fuckups then, aren’t we?”

Flynn quirks a dark brow, as if to say, yes, yes, that is one word for it. He takes another drink, hand drifting to his pocket, touching the rings stashed there. After another moment, as if having ensured that this won’t cause Wyatt to recommence with the punching, he takes them out, staring at the slender silver circlets. Picks them up and turns them over, as if trying to decide if they’re something that any version of him might give to Lucy. Both the men have to admit that they suit her. Nothing too fancy or ostentatious, rings for working hands like hers, slim and tasteful. A small diamond and a matching wedding band that looks very much like Flynn’s current one, but styled for a woman. Whichever timeline-Flynn did this, well, he could have done worse. A lot worse.

Flynn glances at Wyatt again, and there is clearly a question as to whether he should hand them back to Lucy. And if so, how. There is a difference between _giving_ them, an implicit acknowledgement of what they are and what they mean and a willingness to take that up, and _returning_ them, shutting that door for good. As in when Flynn saw Lucy throw them on the floor, there is that ever-so-slight awareness that perhaps it’s not what he wants. As if he has been dragged kicking and screaming and struggling into it, and tried at every turn to stubbornly reject it, but maybe – here, now – he can’t. Not altogether. Because the greatest betrayal, the most unforgivable sin is, to his mind, not that he doesn’t want it. It’s that he does.

“So,” Flynn says at last. “Do I just…get rid of them?”

“I don’t know that I get to tell you that.” Wyatt finishes off the dregs of the nearest bottle. “I mean, technically. They’re yours, aren’t they?”

Flynn supposes so. He looks at them again, one more time, then closes his fist around them and slides them back into his pocket. Looks at his watch. “We should get back.”

Wyatt agrees, and they fish out some crumpled bills to settle the tab. They check the street outside before leaving a few minutes apart, and take different routes back to the safe house, stepping inside and checking the locks. Rufus is never far from the alert that will go off if Rittenhouse jumps again, as thanks to Flynn, the Mothership doesn’t need the same recharge as the Lifeboat. Both of them devoutly hope they might get at least a little rest before this happens. Not that evil organizations bent on taking over the world schedule their conquest attempts according to the convenience of the Rebel Alliance, but still.

Wyatt, yawning, claps Flynn on the shoulder again and trudges off toward his bunk, leaving Flynn standing in the middle of the dark hall. He thinks about doing the same, but finally lets out a slow, jagged breath and heads upstairs. Down the hall to the room at the end, then knocks.

“Lucy?”

There is a pause, as he can hear her deciding whether she wants to answer. He wouldn’t blame her if not. His behavior hasn’t been the kind that warrants an invitation in late at night for a private chat, but after a pause, she opens the door. She’s in her pink flannel pajamas, dark hair spilling loose on her shoulders, but it’s clear she wasn’t asleep. She folds her arms reflexively at the sight of him, as if bracing for more accusations. “Yes?”

“Can I – ” He clears his throat awkwardly. “Can I come in?”

Lucy considers, then steps back, making a slight gesture of permission, and he ducks inside. Her room isn’t much, as none of theirs are, but it’s stacked with her books, her piles of papers, the endless research she does to track Rittenhouse through history, to try to judge where they’ll target next, to see how far the effects have spread. She works harder than any of them on this, and Flynn feels a faint, oblique pang of guilt. He and Wyatt have been so involved with their own damn pride that they _have_ left her – and Rufus, he supposes, he still has trouble remembering that he’s part of a team – to twist in the wind. He nods at it. “Any luck?”

“Maybe.” It’s clear that Lucy doesn’t think he’s here to talk about potential trajectories and vulnerable targets. She shuts the book she appears to be looking through, marking it with a picture of herself and Amy – the only one she has, the one she managed to salvage from the timeline with her sister’s existence. Flynn’s guilt settles onto his shoulders like a heavy black mantle, bending and warping. It’s because of Lucy – her writing, her journal, her persistence – that he’s here at all, that he’s been doing this. Him with Lorena and Iris, Wyatt with Jessica – Lucy’s lost someone too, but you’d never find her giving in, crumpling, flying apart. She glances up at him. “Well?”

“I…” Flynn rarely finds himself at a loss for words often, but when he does, it always seems to happen with her. He thinks he should sit, though the options are only on the desk chair or the bed, and neither of those feel quite appropriate. “I’m, well. I’m sorry. For the… last few weeks. It hasn’t been fair on you. I’m sorry.”

Lucy’s eyelashes flutter slightly, lips tightening, as if she was going to ask when he’s ever been terribly concerned about being _fair_ on her, but decides to accept the white flag rather than open up another artillery salvo. Instead she nods once. “Yes. Thank you.”

Technically, Flynn supposes, that’s all he needs to do. He could get up and leave now, and assume that he has cleared the books sufficiently that their next mission might have a chance of not being a complete disaster. Instead he stays where he is, looks at her when he thinks she isn’t looking, discovers her trying to do the same thing, and they both glance away in haste. The silence remains raw. Then he says, “So you really do think we’re – you know. We’re…” Cravenly, he can’t even get the fucking word out.

“Married.” Lucy, as always, is braver. “Yeah.”

“We’re, though. We’re…” He hesitates. “We’re not.”

Her mouth tightens again. “Fine,” she says evenly. “We’ll accept it as a timeline accident and nothing else. After all, if I only remember something that didn’t technically happen, then there’s no way to say it did. We might change it back one of these days anyway. Then that’s – that’s what.” She puts a hand on her desk, as if steadying herself. “That’s what’s best.”

Flynn knows he should agree to this, that this is sensible, that this is even what everyone concerned should want. Instead, his eyes flicker to the worn picture of Lucy and Amy, the one keepsake she has left of a lost loved one, and he knows, however little sense this makes to him or how much it can only be described as a sheer and improbable twist of fate, that Lucy is voluntarily suggesting to give up another one. If that’s what it takes for Rittenhouse to be defeated, if it’s going to stop the team from coming together, then fine, she’ll make another sacrifice, when Wyatt and Flynn have been so jealously hanging onto any possibility of retrieving the one they never wanted to. And she won’t say another word about it, most likely. She’ll just quietly go on suffering by night, and working still harder by day.

Of course she will.

Even if the loved one is somehow – even more improbably – _him,_ and as far as he can tell, giving him up should be no struggle at all.

He looks down at his hands on his knees. Knows he could agree, and knows beyond all doubt how selfish of him it will be if he does. Not that this has ever been something he’s been terribly concerned with before, but this is different. How could any of them claim with a straight face that they just wanted their own loved ones back, that they were doing this altruistically for someone else’s sake, if they keep letting Lucy get caught in their crossfire like this? She’s the best of them. (Or possibly that is Rufus, but still.) Destroying her, somehow, is not acceptable collateral damage.

Flynn takes half a step, not knowing what he intends to do. Lucy tenses, and he almost stops, but instead he makes himself lift his hands. They hover in the dark air, and then settle on her shoulders. He hears her draw in a quick gasp, as it’s certainly the closest he’s been to her in weeks, the longest conversation he’s had, or by far the most he’s ventured to touch her. A faint shudder ripples through her from head to toe, and her own hands come up to cover his before she can stop herself. She squeezes, briefly. Then she lets go. If that was all he was going to do, she’s managed to make peace with it. Somehow.

Flynn considers it. He can still feel the slight weight of the rings in his pocket. He’s not about to reach in and give them back just yet, but he also doesn’t want to go. She might remember this, but it’s the first time for him, and since it seems to be something she wants, it gives him a strange sort of courage to try. He clumsily slides a hand down her cheek, touches her chin with his thumb, brushing the back of his fingers across her face and tidying a strand of hair out of her face. She stands very still, as if moving might frighten him off, and he feels the soft wisp of her breath against his skin. He is so much taller than her that her nose could fit neatly in his solar plexus, and he feels that odd urge to draw her closer, to shield her, to protect. He most likely would fail her. He did with Lorena and Iris. But for once, he pushes that aside.

He runs his thumb across the curve of her lips, parting them slightly, and rests in the corner. Moves his hand to the back of her neck, opening his palm against the shape of her skull, dark hair ribboning through his fingers. Then still, slowly, sacredly, he tilts his head. Lets their foreheads brush, then their noses. Plants the lightest, faintest ghost of a kiss on the bit of her cheek by the corner of her lip, but she turns her head halfway through, and their mouths lock instead.

Any coherent thought in Flynn’s head almost vanishes with the shock. Her mouth is warm and soft and open, _trusting,_ as for her, clearly, this is something she remembers, a comforting and everyday act rather than the nearly mind-blowing event it is for him. His other hand comes up, cradling her face, as she rises on her tiptoes, her fingers carding through his hair, and he feels brave enough to open his own mouth slightly. She tastes like mint toothpaste, and there’s the faint, fragrant whiff of her shampoo. He utters a muffled sound in the back of his throat, feeling molten. Thinks of the light through the windows of the church, variegated through the stained glass, as he asked for absolution. Knowing, even then, he wasn’t likely to ever find it.

He tastes just that bit of it, that breath of life, in her kiss.

It staggers him.

Lucy makes another soft noise and presses herself closer, fisting a handful of his jacket, pulling his mouth more firmly against her own. Flynn’s hands drift down to her hips, returning the favor, and the kiss gets deeper and hotter and more involved, as if she’s been hungry for him all this time, starving, but still did not intend on saying a word, since she has gotten so used to patiently classifying her own pain as insignificant. To putting it aside. Now, finally, somehow, she’s getting a scrap of solace from that burden, and the sensation of such relief must be – well. Incalculable. Unspeakable. He almost can’t stand to put it back on her.

At last, however, he breaks the kiss, their faces still close, sharing breath, noses brushing, mouths open as they struggle for air. He knows he can’t go any further without crossing the point of no return, and that’s not something he’s ready for tonight, not now. He doesn’t want to leave her, but this is still not his own, is not real. Just a mirage, shimmering away in the distance.

“You need to sleep,” he whispers in her ear, as her arms are still around his neck, her body surrendered against his. He gently disentangles her, sets her down. “It’s late.”

Lucy hesitates, biting her lip. It’s clear she’s struggling almightily with the urge to beg him to stay, to sleep with her, in whatever sense of the word that could entail. But she doesn’t. Instead, as always, she nods. Then rises on her tiptoes, and kisses him quickly, chastely, on the cheek.

“Good night, Garcia,” she says, and opens the door. Steps back, and beckons for him to go. “So do you.”


	3. Chapter 3

The Time Team hops back into the saddle the next morning. Literally, because they are headed to 1876 Montana, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and Custer’s Last Stand, which by the looks of things, and for reasons best known to them, Rittenhouse wants to turn into Custer’s Stirring Victory. This means a lot of horseback riding, rifles slung on shoulders, hats, bandanas, spurs, lassos, and general cowboying it up, as well as trying to make contact with the Sioux and Sitting Bull to warn them that the Army will be bringing weapons the likes of which they have never seen. It’s dangerous, delicate work, and the team absolutely has to be clicking on all cylinders, as any hint of tension or dissent will be interpreted most suspiciously – two white men and a white woman do not have much reason to tip off the Indians, after all. As when they met the Shawnee and Nonhelema in 1754, it’s Rufus who has to serve as the first point of diplomatic contact, while Lucy, Wyatt, and Flynn sit on their hands and hold their tongues. Once they’ve finally established that they might have legit motives, Sitting Bull wants to know who, exactly, they are. They are clearly not settlers or homesteaders from around here.

“No,” Flynn says. “We’re not. We’re from – Europe. Germany. Came to work on the railroads – Land of Promise, yes? This is my wife, and this is her little brother. He couldn’t find a woman willing to have him in the village, so he traveled out here with us.”

Wyatt says something in German which translates roughly as, “This man is full of shit, but I recognize the need to put up a united front, so I will refrain from pointing it out.” He even manages to say it while nodding and appearing to agree with Flynn’s statement. It’s pretty impressive.

Lucy chokes, as while French is her main foreign language rather than German, she can make out enough to get the sense of this. She also feels rather and unexpectedly warm, as while it is obviously in the service of a cover story (which they have forced Flynn to actually think of, rather than announcing their status as time travelers to all and sundry) it is the first time he has referred to her as his wife in this altered existence. His eyes flicker to hers, then away.

At any rate, they’re still not sure what to do to ensure that the Indians win, as they are supposed to, against a 7th Cavalry Regiment armed with Rittenhouse-supplied modern automatic weapons. That, however, is a problem for Not Right Now, and it is already late. After taking their leave of Sitting Bull with promises to return as soon as they know more, they head out of the teepee to where they have picketed the horses. They were only able to acquire three, and while Lucy rode out here with Rufus, she shoots another oblique glance at Flynn, as if waiting to see if he’ll give her a hand up onto his.

He hesitates, then does so, as she clambers up into the saddle with more or less (decidedly less) dexterity, and clutches onto the rope horn to avoid slipping off. He swings up behind her with considerably more ease and puts an arm around her waist to steady her. Both of them can sense the tension that flashes through them, the way her breath briefly catches. Then he reaches around her with both hands to take the reins, and she dips her head beneath his chin so he can see where he’s going. She does tuck quite neatly against his chest. He gives a click to the horse, and they start to move.

It’s quiet when they canter back into town, which is not much more than a clapboard general store, a trading post, a church, a boarding house, seven saloons, and a sheriff and surveyor’s office along the banks of the Little Bighorn River. Despite the popular idea of the Old West as a lawless gunslingers’ paradise, that isn’t the case – the most shooting deaths that Tombstone, Arizona, supposedly the hotbed of bank robbers, six-shooters, and showdowns in the OK Corral, ever had in a year was two. This, however, takes no account of the current presence of Rittenhouse, which very much does want to light this place up like a Clint Eastwood movie, and Wyatt and Flynn both glance around warily as they rein in. If anyone had any notion that they might be passing information to the Indians, they don’t need a gun when a good old-fashioned noose will work just fine.

Nobody, however, seems to be around, and they swing down and tie up. They have taken rooms in two separate establishments, as the four of them inevitably attract attention when they’re together, and there is once more the question of who is pairing off with whom. Lucy was going to go with Rufus again, but a black man with a white woman will have a target on his back, and she doesn’t want to put him in that kind of danger. And, well. There’s already one of them who claimed to be married to her, and technically speaking, is.

She tells herself to stop being an idiot. Allows Flynn to help her off the horse, and makes herself smile at him. “So. Call it a night?”

He pauses, then nods. With a look between the four of them, it is silently and carefully decided that Lucy will go with Flynn to the boarding house, where a respectable married couple would be expected to take a room, and Wyatt and Rufus, as two bachelors, will take the room at the saloon. This might even be fun for them, as drinks are not all the place serves, but Rufus is far too loyal to Jiya to take a tumble with some heavily rouged nineteenth-century floozy and Wyatt, well, it’s obvious he’s not going to. They make plans to meet up at first rooster crow tomorrow, and split for the night.

Lucy is too aware of Flynn’s presence at her side as they walk along the dirt road to the boarding house, which has a half-burned lantern dangling from the post. Flynn blows it out, and they open the door – nobody sees the need to lock them around here – and sneak past the kitchen where the proprietress is snoring by the woodstove with a half-empty bottle of cooking sherry, up the creaking stairs. Their room is at the top of the house, in the steep-roofed garret, so that Flynn has to be careful where he stands up too straight or he will crack his skull. This place has not been designed with the needs of six-foot-four ex-commandos in mind.

They open the room door and let themselves in. There is a washstand with a porcelain pitcher and basin, an unlit oil lamp, a trunk, a roll-top desk, a few clothes hooks, and of course a bed, which is spread with a worn patchwork quilt and looks, well, smaller than Lucy expected. Not that she thought there would be a hotel-standard queen size, but it still seems… cozy. Nor do the floorboards look particularly comfortable, though Flynn might volunteer to sleep on them anyway if he can’t stand to be close to her. They stand there for an awkward moment, until Flynn finally moves to shut the door behind them, and they startle at the sudden noise in the quiet. It’s June, so it’s stuffy in the garret, and what with all the clothes that people in this century have to wear, they are both pricking with sweat, especially after the long ride. It’s Lucy who moves to open the window, propping it with a stick, in hopes of letting in a bit of a breeze. Then she removes her hat, knots her hair off her neck, pauses, then shucks her gloves and riding duster. Obviously, she isn’t sleeping in those.

Flynn’s eyes follow her without a word, until he finally shrugs and removes his own cowboy hat and cuffed black jacket, running a hand through his tousled hair in a way that Lucy cannot help but inspect – academically, of course. Once he pulls off his calico neckerchief as well, the muslin shirt beneath is considerably open at the throat, pasted to broad shoulders and barrel chest and extremely solid arm muscles, and Lucy feels a dryness in her own throat that decidedly does not have to do with dust. There’s a bucket of water hauled up from the pump in the backyard, intended for washing, and if she wants more than that, she’ll have to fetch it herself. But she dips the tin cup in and takes a drink, trying to wet her whistle. Surreptitiously, she hopes.

She hangs up her jacket, then perches gingerly on the chair to remove her boots, as Flynn does the same. They still have their backs to each other, as pretending that they are undressing normally for sleep by themselves in a small room, where the only true fact about this statement is “small room,” is quite a feat, but they do. Now it’s time for the skirt, which is slightly more dangerous. Lucy’s fingers fumble as she undoes the finicky buttons, even though there is absolutely no good reason for them to do so. She hears a clink as Flynn must be unfastening his suspenders. Her heart is pounding so fast and short that she briefly fears she’s going to go into spontaneous cardiac arrest and die at the age of thirty-four. That does happen, you know.

In this case, however, it doesn’t. She slides off the skirt and unties her shirtwaisted blouse, pulling it over her head. Now there are just stays and shift and drawers left. And while everyday stays for working women aren’t as uncomfortable or restrictive as the high-society whalebone corsets meant to throttle them into perfect hourglass silhouettes, they’re still not exactly sleepwear, and Lucy can’t get them off by herself. She coughs and clears her throat. “Can you, uh. Can you. . . unlace me?”

She can hear that almost hanging in the air, and doesn’t dare look around to see which items of clothing Flynn himself still has on – or doesn’t. For a moment, she thinks he’s going to pretend that he has gone temporarily deaf. She can possibly wrangle herself out if she needs to, though it’s going to be a pain. Or he could just lend a goddamn hand and –

Right as she’s wondering if he really is going to leave her hanging, she hears the floor creak, and feels the sudden materialization of his presence at her back, his breath on her neck, and a tug at her stays as he starts fiddling with the knots, which are pulled tight and soaked with sweat and don’t want to give way easily. She expects him to complain or otherwise make some sort of smart remark about how long this is taking, but he doesn’t. He has to get a few fingers between the corset and her shift, and gooseflesh breaks out on Lucy’s skin where he brushes her, however lightly. Jesus Christ. This is going to be… interesting. She has to clench both fists until her nails make crescent moons in her palms, otherwise she’ll turn around and grab him and push him to his knees in front of her. Heat curls in her stomach, and lower. She establishes a death grip on the back of the rickety chair, to be sure her watery legs don’t betray her.

At last, Flynn pulls the stays loose, and Lucy lets out a breath of sheer relief as her compacted innards expand, grimacing as she rubs at the rigid grooves worn into her flesh. Flynn drapes the corset over the chair, his shadow falling over her, and Lucy notices that he still has his shirt and trousers on, though both are unfastened and hang loose on him. He steps back, then pulls off the trousers, folding them precisely. He still has on his underwear – which is modern Calvin Klein, as he sees no need to gallivant around in historically accurate unmentionables, especially when a lot of riding will be involved – but other than that, it’s just his shirt.

Lucy almost stops breathing altogether. She doesn’t know if he’s sending a silent signal that he’s up for it if she is, if he is outright daring her to resist, or if he’s simply decided that of course he is not sleeping in his grubby clothes and sees nothing out of the ordinary about this at all. Her fingers are trembling again as she undoes the string on her drawers and steps out of them, and then – before she can stop herself – she removes her panties as well, which it so happens are also decidedly twenty-first century, buy-two-get-one from Victoria’s  Secret. She just has on her shift. She feels quite airy, quite breathless, and so wet that she can feel the slickness like dew between her thighs. _Jesus._ Even if he is intending for them to actually sleep, it’ll be incredibly hard to take care of this herself without attracting his attention.

The two of them turn at more or less the same moment, gazes locking. Flynn’s tongue darts out to unconsciously lick his lips, that expression he sometimes gives her where he is clearly imagining what she looks like naked, which is not the thing to help Lucy’s already tenuous self-control. They take a slow step, almost close enough to touch, but not quite. They probably should, or something, or at least say a word. The entire room might blow sky-high otherwise.

Another step. He lifts a hand, runs a knuckle down the side of her torso through the thin fabric of the shift, almost curving under her breast, but not quite. Lucy sucks in a breath hard enough to hurt as his hand splays on her ribs, slowly and unhurriedly, and his thumb ghosts over her nipple, which stiffens to a peak at once. He still doesn’t say anything, though his eyes briefly flick to hers. It’s pretty damn clear to both of them that she has no problem with this whatsoever, and in fact would like him to be even more forward. She shifts involuntarily, as his hand moves to fully cup her breast through the fabric. Then, slowly, the other follows suit, still lightly and without apparent attempt to hasten onwards.

Lucy’s breath hitches raw, as she wants the shift out of the way but there is no way to take it off without being completely naked, and that, obviously, is more of an invitation than he might be comfortable with. He continues to keep his hands where they are, thumbing the nipples, with a faint look of approval. Not that this Flynn remembers, but he’s quite a fan of Lucy’s body, the generous curves of her ass, the slight roundness to her stomach, the slim lines of her torso and the fullness of her breasts, has said that he never understood the appeal of a woman who was as flat as a board. Wants something to touch, to explore, to hold on to. This is what he is currently doing, and Lucy is certainly enjoying it, but she is just about out of patience to hold back. Not that she wants to spook him or move too fast or otherwise send him off on one of his Flynn tangents, but she is downright suffering here.

He puts his thumbs together, drawing them down her solar plexus, covering her breasts with each hand and pulling the shift low on her shoulders. He bends to kiss the column of her neck lightly, still almost tentatively, as if expecting her to come to her senses and push him away. Instead, her own hand comes up, clasping the back of his head, as her other arm wraps around his chest. She lets out a soft, breathless whine as he explores her throat and collarbone and jaw, nips at her hammering pulse, presses branding kisses into her shoulder and almost into her cleavage, but neither quite there or at her mouth. She can’t tell if he’s trying to torture her, or just doesn’t feel as if he has permission to outright go there. If so, she decides to make it clear. Links both arms  around his neck, straining on her tiptoes, and pulls his dark head down to hers.

Their mouths collide almost clumsily at first, closed and shy, until all at once, it turns raw and ravenous. Flynn shoves her back against the wall, knocking the desk with a rattle, as Lucy boosts herself up and locks her legs around his waist. He lifts her effortlessly, and his hand claws into her hair, their mouths open and deep and devouring. He pulls her lower lip between his teeth and she returns the favor, exploring him with tongue and teeth, biting and gulping, gasping, a kiss that is not even broken for a proper breath, as they simply turn their heads and go after each other again. He gets his hands under her thighs and swings her around again, her ankles still locked behind his back, as he walks them across the room as they continue to make out. They reach the bed and he sits smartly on it, pulling her onto his lap, as she moves to take his face in her hands and lean over him, hair falling in loosened locks around her eyes. She settles astride him, knees to either side of his thighs, and can’t help herself from grinding into him. Both of them groan, and he swears. “Lucy – ”

It’s the first thing either of them have said since they got here, and it sounds almost like a prayer, an incantation, half miraculous on his lips, as hers are bruised and wet and swollen and she can hardly stand for them to have stopped this long. She shifts up on him again, pulls on his shirt, he lets go of her long enough for her to haul it over his head, and she runs both hands over the hard planes of his chest. He’s scarred, battered and bruised, but solid as a rock, strong as iron. This man stares down the entire world, orders it to move, and it does. No wonder he’s a still point in the middle of a raging storm.

Lucy’s eyelashes flutter as she moves to wrap her arms around his neck again, hands caressing his head, tilting his mouth up for hers again, a somewhat slower kiss this time, but just as savage and thorough. Flynn grips her hips almost hard enough to bruise, thumbs in the joint, fingers pressing into her like clay – she thinks of that sculpture of the two marble lovers, where you can see the tension and strength of the man’s hand on the woman’s thigh, present even in the stone, the depths of the art to craft them. Pulls her onto him again as they slide backwards on the bed, still kissing. God, she needs him. Still thinks he might run. But is on the verge of finding out, once and for all, if he will.

She leans back, pulling out the hem of her shift from where it’s trapped between them. Slowly, giving him time to stop her or change his mind, she takes hold of it, skims it up, over legs and stomach and chest, over her head. Shucks it, tosses it aside in a crumpled heap, and stares at him, completely bare, not a stitch on her. Still straddling him, waiting, tense, silent.

It’s Flynn’s turn to stop breathing. There’s not much light in the garret, but the summer nights are long this far north, and there’s enough. His eyes rake over her, so powerfully and silently hungry that it feels almost physical, taking her in, unable to believe that she’s here and she still seems to want him. Despite the heat of their kissing earlier, he clearly is having another short-circuit at this. His fingers trace lightly over the top of her thigh, circle around her hip, climb her rib, and finally revisit her breasts, without the fabric to get in the way. He strokes and molds and kneads, softening her and shaping her, with the same unblinking intensity as he does everything, leaving no stone left unturned. Finally, still more slowly, he draws a finger down her stomach, then lower. Nudges at her, not quite there, but almost. Waits.

Lucy takes his hand and eases it between her legs, both of them hissing as the pad of his thumb drags over her clit. He presses into her ever so slightly, until the tip of his index finger teases at her entrance. He glances up at her, then slides into her to the first knuckle. After a moment, to the second. Then as she whines and presses back on him, to the fork of his hand. This is accompanied with a long, slow slide over her clit from his thumb that makes her see stars, as she grips his shoulders and lets out a shaky gasp. “Garcia – ”

He glances up at her with hooded eyes, in which a spark of his old arrogance is clearly visible; he has her rather literally in the palm of his hand and he may just intend to make her suffer. She tries to thrust on him, but he stills her with his other hand, lips musing at her chest again, moving to take a nipple in his mouth. Suckles it, licks a circle, as he starts to explore her with his finger, then adds a second with a quick, insistent twist. Lucy heaves a breath, stomach quivering, as she tries to get him to pick up the pace, but he gives her another look. If this is happening, as it appears to be, it’s going to be as he chooses to. She will just have to be patient.

He strokes and teases her to the brink of climax, but won’t let her tumble over the edge into release, and she whines aloud as he withdraws his hand. Their lips muse, as she nips at his mouth again and his other hand slides slowly up her bare back, tracing the lines of her spine. Then he shifts her off and, rather abruptly, stands up.

Lucy lands on the bed, feeling rather cast aside and certainly incredibly frustrated, if this is where he’s going to draw the line – even though, of course, she’ll accept it if he does. But instead he looks at her, keeps looking at her, and slowly slides off the Calvin Klein underpants, the last bit of clothing remaining on either of them. Steps out of them, and kicks them aside. Stands there, clearly fighting an almighty urge to back away or cover himself or otherwise put an end to this madness somehow, and lets her look.

After a spellbound moment, Lucy gets off the bed, moves to him, and runs her own hands down his sides, taking hold of him and pulling his head down, her knee riding up on his hip as he lifts her again. Then she slides a hand on his stomach, feeling him tense and think about pulling away from her, but she has an advantage here that he doesn’t. She remembers their first time, how she touched him then to put him at ease, to slowly bring down his walls, to whisper in the darkness that he could trust her. And this, now, she does.

Flynn shudders from head to toe, not altogether steady himself, as Lucy palms down and takes him in her hand. He’s stiff and hot against her fingers, and she strokes slowly, pulling his earlobe between her teeth, kissing the underside of his jaw, his unshaven dark stubble rasping against her lips. He jerks sharply against her hand, as if to say that if this is how it is, she _could_ get on with it please and thank you, and there are certainly attractions to making him suffer in turn, draw it out, go slow. But after all this and everything, Lucy Preston-Flynn (she changed her name to that, although he likewise does not remember) has had more than goddamn enough of _slow._

She pushes him around, back onto the bed, and he goes down with a rather surprised look. She climbs up on him, spreads herself with her fingers, and guides him with her other hand, so slick that he glides in almost without a catch. He swears in one of the several languages he speaks, as Lucy whimpers, hitches herself up, and slowly and thoroughly takes him deeper, watching him enter her inch by inch, until he settles hilt deep, and she gasps. Slides forward on her knees, pushing him onto his back, settling on him, hard and deep and pulsing inside her. Rolls into one thrust, experimentally. Then another.

Flynn swears again, eyes half-closed, sweat glistening on his cheek, as she feels him coil and tense, then all at once, rise up and flip her over beneath him. He thrusts into her practically to the back of her spine, catching both of her wrists in one of his hands and pulling them up over her head. He bends her like a bow as her legs lock around the small of his back, dragging him still deeper, his left hand fisting the sheet next to her head and his right struggling to keep hold of her wrists as she fights to pull free, needing to touch him, needing to claw him. He drags his open mouth against hers, not quite a kiss, too hungry and unformed and raw for that, as he thrusts again with the force of a lightning strike, making the bed thump distinctly loud on the old floorboards. Lucy devoutly hopes that the proprietress drank plenty of that sherry.

That, however, is about all the conscious thought she has space for, as Flynn seems intent on driving it, and everything else, out of her. It’s almost like it was the first time, so much, too much, too hard, too raw, too real. They strain and slip on the delicious friction as he attends to every inch of her, as the sensation of their coupling sends shocks through her to her toes and she finally manages to get her hands loose from his restraining grip. Wraps her arms around his chest, digging her nails into the muscles of his shoulders, burning, _burning._ “Yes,” she manages. “Yes. Garcia, there. Oh God. Yes. There. Oh God.”

It’s hard to tell, but he might look rather too pleased with himself, as if he is doing a damn fine job of hitting her sweet spot even without actually remembering where it is. He keeps pushing her as they roll over and over, entangled in the quilt, her head dangling over the side of the bed until he gathers it in with his hand and takes her mouth with another half-vicious kiss. _“Draga,”_ he mutters, half-formed, tasted in their shared breath. _“Draga žena.”_

Lucy isn’t quite sure what that means, and she’s also not entirely sure he realizes he’s saying it. She whines, bucking her hips up into his again, as they end up sitting half upright, fallen back among the pillows, as he thrusts once more and she reaches to finger herself, bringing them both over the edge in a gulping, furious, blinding rush. He rolls her over one more time, pins her flat, and loses himself in her, head buried in her shoulder, her arms around his neck. Burning.

Reality takes a long time to resolve into any sort of sense after that, with the strength of the embers still smoldering in Lucy’s eyes, when everything everywhere feels as if it’s barely real, that this night and this bed and the two of them are the only solid creatures in a world of shadows and stars and sex and sleep. She strokes his head and kisses his ear, as he remains sprawled on her as if his back has been broken, clearly unable to move even if he wanted to. Then at last he shifts, sliding out of her, and collapses next to her on the bed, totally done for.

Lucy doesn’t want to ask about the rings. Doesn’t want to ask what they are, if this changes anything, if this means they’re back together (or even if that’s the most appropriate term). Doesn’t want to break the spell, or for either of them to wake up. Instead, she tugs out the snarled quilt, doing her best to make it less of a rat’s nest, and spreads it over both of them. She almost expects him to curl away from her, but he reaches out and pulls her against him, her back to his chest, resting his chin on her head. Makes a deep, hoarse, wordless sound of repletion, as she settles his hand on her stomach and nuzzles into him.

Dawn is going to come much too soon. They have another war tomorrow.

And so now, in the peace they do have, in the darkness, they sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

Pro: The team manages to stop Rittenhouse in the nick of time and ensure that the Indians will win the Battle of Little Bighorn, as they are supposed to.

Con (and it is very definitely a con): Lucy gets shot.

It doesn’t happen until almost the end, when they think they’ve managed to pull off the mother of all improbable corrections. But this is called Custer’s Last Stand for a reason, George Armstrong Custer does not intend to stop fighting until he is good and dead, and in the chaos and skirmishing, as the Time Team is trying to get out of there, a round catches Lucy nastily in the side. It knocks her flat as she screams in pain, Wyatt, Rufus, and Flynn all swear horribly at once, and it is a labor of Hercules to get back to the Lifeboat. It’s also a miracle that Rufus manages to pilot them back to 2017, given that Wyatt is doing emergency field surgery on Lucy and Flynn is on the verge of catastrophic nuclear meltdown. He does, but it’s close.

The instant they land, it’s clear that Lucy is hurt enough that, no matter the prospects of tangling with Rittenhouse, they need to take her to the hospital. She is struggling to stay awake and losing blood in the backseat as Rufus drives at ninety miles an hour to the emergency room (they all hope it isn’t the hospital Noah works at, because that would be awkward) and Wyatt and Flynn carry her inside. Lucy has enough wits to give her name as Amy Wallace, and she is whisked off at once while the men stand there, stunned and stricken and splattered with blood. All of them are in shock. The team is nothing without her.

They pace. They stare at the shitty magazines. Finally, when the nurse comes back and tells them that she’s all right, they more or less collapse on the spot. “I can’t allow you to see her just now, she’s resting. In the meantime, however, we have a few questions. How, exactly, was Ms. Wallace injured?”

“Is this a hospital or a police inquest?” Flynn growls. “We don’t have to answer that.”

“Sir, I realize this is an emotional time, but – ”

Flynn snarls, makes to stomp directly past the nurse, has to be restrained by Rufus (looking rather taken aback at his own nerve, and clearly about to have to do the same thing for Wyatt) and settles for looking murderous. “You said she’s going to be all right, yes?”

“Yes. Sir – ” The nurse tries to grab him again as he makes another go for it. “Sir, I can only let family in to see her, and if you’re not her – ”

“I’M HER HUSBAND, YOU – ”

Both Wyatt and Rufus blink very hard and try to look as if this is not news to them. Wyatt bites his tongue hard, but starting an argument about who is actually her husband would have the hospital calling Jerry Springer, if not the police, and this is not the time for it, or to get them to investigate any further into their shabby ruse. The nurse blinks as well. “Even if so, Mr. Wallace, she still needs to – ”

“Seriously, man,” Rufus says. “Do yourself a favor and let us see her.”

“And you two are?”

“We’re her brothers.” Rufus elbows Wyatt, clearly advising him to look more like a brother. “Can we see her, please?”

The nurse is still clearly very suspicious of this, but relents, and lets them back to see Lucy, who is drowsing in bed, clearly morphined out of her mind. She gives them a woozy smile. “Hey, guys.”

“Ms. Wallace, this is your… husband?” The nurse’s tone makes it clear that she doesn’t think terribly much of Lucy’s taste in men. “And your brothers?”

“Yeah.” Lucy shifts with a grimace, as all three of them rush to her side and then hover awkwardly, trying to avoid touching her or hurting her more. “Thanks.”

“Five minutes,” the nurse warns the boys, who pay absolutely no attention to her, and retreats.

“You okay?” Wyatt says tentatively. “Jesus, you scared us!”

“M’ fine.” Lucy’s eyelashes flutter. It is doubtful she will remember any of this in the morning. She struggles to hold out a hand to Flynn, grimacing with the effort. “Hey. Hey?”

Flynn doesn’t take it. He swallows visibly, gaze transfixed on her, as if it’s hitting him all at once: sleeping with her, calling her his wife, being so terrified about her life or death that it is the only thing that seems to matter. He starts to say something, then stops. “Go to sleep, L – Amy,” he says, the sound of her real name still echoing half-unspoken in the air. “You need it.”

“Garcia.” Lucy reaches for him again, and falls back on the pillow with a grunt of pain, as Wyatt takes her other hand and glares evilly at Flynn. Her eyelashes sparkle briefly too bright, her fingers clawing at the air between them, trying to close it. “Garcia, please.”

He still doesn’t move. That is, at least, until he finally ticks into motion like a badly wound automaton, blundering out of the room, for all his insistence and anger on getting into it in the first place. Lucy stares after him, stunned, as Wyatt holds her hand harder and Rufus clears his throat. “I, um, should I tell a joke or something?”

Neither of them pay attention to him, which is just as well, and after a moment, he decides to hell with it. Leaving Wyatt behind to act like the supportive, emotionally mature partner in this situation, Rufus runs down the corridor after Flynn, who has already made it to the exit, dodges through the doors, and catches him in the parking lot. “Hey. HEY!”

Flynn stops, tense from head to heel, not looking around. “Yes?”

“Really. You’re telling them you’re her husband, and then you’re walking out on her?” Rufus demands. “You mean you’re her deadbeat ex-husband, or you’re the idiot with the emotional intelligence of a dried-up Happy Meal?”

“She – ” At that, Flynn does spin around, eyes wild. “She has you two! That’s what she needs!”

“Yeah, and thank God she does.” Rufus isn’t in the mood to pull any punches. “But for some reason, she wants you too. She wants you. She is lying in a hospital bed because she was _shot_ back there making sure history happened right, and all you can see are your own hangups and your own issues and everything else. Get back in there. Get back in there, you – you coward!”

Flynn actually flinches. Rufus himself looks rather taken aback at his nerve, in speaking this way to a guy who could probably snap him like a twig if he decided to. But he won’t back down, folding his arms and glaring blue murder at Flynn until, tall as he is, even he shrinks slightly. He runs a hand through his hair, swallows, spins away, then back. “I – I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“How about that’s not up to you to decide? Because you suck. At making decisions, that is. And being a functional human person. If you can’t do it remotely for yourself, at least do it for Lucy. Otherwise, just…” Rufus stalls for a moment, but can’t hold back. “Just go. Stop doing this to her. She – for some reason, she does – she loves you. Can’t you see it?”

“I don’t de – ”

“Please,” Rufus says. “For the love of God. Do not finish that sentence.”

Flynn snaps his mouth shut hard enough to click. They remain staring at each other in the dark parking lot, until he finally shakes his head, shakes it again, and follows Rufus silently back into the hospital, up into Lucy’s room. She’s drifted off in a painkiller haze, looking upset, as Wyatt pins Flynn with a scorching expression as he makes his grand re-entrance. _“Wow.”_

“I…” Flynn trails off. “Could have done that better.”

Wyatt and Rufus give him identical _no-shit-Sherlock_ baleful stares.

The nurse arrives thirty seconds later to kick them all out anyway, and when she asks who she should phone with any news, they inform her that isn’t necessary, they won’t be far. They head out to the waiting room and slump in the brutally uncomfortable chairs, dazed by the fluorescent lights, still with Lucy’s blood on their clothes. They should probably go back to the safe house, change and shower and sleep, but nobody can countenance the thought.

They spend a cramped and uncomfortable night. They’re finally kicked out around two AM when the doctor comes out, insists that Lucy is not in life-threatening danger, and that they need to take care of themselves in the meantime. So they stumble loathingly out, get a cab to five blocks from the safe house and then walk the rest of the way separately. Wash off the blood, sleep a few fitful hours, and then are up again at the crack of dawn.

Flynn is getting dressed in a haze when he hears something ping as it falls on the floor, and looks down to see that Lucy’s rings have fallen out of his spare jacket. He barely remembered that they were in there, and for a moment, he thinks he should just put them away again and not introduce any further complications. But he can’t quite bring himself to do it, for some reason, and after a moment, puts them in his pocket again. Drags a comb through his bedraggled hair, and staggers out with Wyatt and Rufus to go back to the godforsaken fucking hospital. At least, he supposes, he gets this much. At least there’s still a chance, not the other, not the –

_“Lorena?”_

_The strange, dull thump that he knew too well, the sound of a gun with a silencer affixed. Not silent, not really. Just less shattering, as if that somehow made a difference. As if it would be anything less than shattering when you saw its results. When you understood._

_“LORENA? IRIS?!”_

_No sound. He thought there was a scream, there might have been the beginning of one, but it was already choked and empty._

_He pulled the gun, his own gun, and flew up the stairs into the bedroom._

_The balcony door was open, off its hinges. They must have jumped through, onto the street beyond, and run, and for a moment he considered following them. Only a moment, though._

_Then he saw what – or rather, who – was on the bed, and he collapsed._

Flynn shakes his head violently, struggling to brace himself, as tears sting his eyes hard as he blinks them away. He knows he deserved that tongue-lashing from Rufus, deserved it and more besides, but a giant fist has closed around his chest, the awful memories seething free like evil spirits – the ones he has had to quite literally repress because he is not strong enough to relive them on a consistent basis. Lorena sprawled where she had fallen over Iris, trying to protect her, as he ran to them, as he somehow thought that CPR or chest compressions or something else useless would work, as he looked into Iris’ glazing eyes and saw nothing behind them but stark, frozen terror. _What if the monsters come while I’m sleeping?_

_Then I’ll protect you, all right? I’ll always protect you._

He didn’t. Not with her. Not with them.

He failed Lucy too. It’s only dumb luck this wasn’t worse, that it was just a stray bullet and she’s strong enough to make it through. He should have stopped it, he should have taken it himself, he should have done so much more, and the idea of watching it happen one more time shrivels the breath in his throat, stops his heart, makes him barely able to stand upright, to remember his name. She has Wyatt and Rufus. She has them.

Flynn takes out the rings again, and puts them on the table. Stares at them, thinks he should write a note, can’t think of the words, or anything he could say that would be sensible, advisable, defensible. Can hear the other two coming downstairs, and waits for them. Tells them he’ll meet them at the hospital, he just has to pick up something first. Must sound reasonably convincing, because they buy it, and Wyatt even claps him on the shoulder and tells him it’s tough, but hey, they’ve been through worse. They’ll make it.

(Flynn is hard pressed to think of what.)

When Wyatt and Rufus are gone, he goes outside. Hails a cab. Takes it to the airport.

Inside, at the ticket counter which has only recently opened for the red-eye crowd, the surprised clerk asks where he wants to go.

Flynn says, “Anywhere.”


	5. Chapter 5

It doesn’t take Wyatt and Rufus long after they get to the hospital to realize something is funny. Lucy is happy to see them, though still considerably doped up, and the doctor says she’s probably out of the woods. Not anywhere close to being actually released yet, though, and that makes everyone antsy. They know Rittenhouse has a golden opportunity right now: either the boys take out the Lifeboat after them and leave Lucy behind, or they stay with Lucy and let those bastards do as they please to history. They haven’t jumped yet, but they’re going to soon. Neither choice is what anyone wants, and Lucy finally says, “Let’s discuss this with Garcia. Where is he, anyway? Didn’t you two say he was going to be here?”

“Yeah.” Wyatt frowns. “He said he’d meet us here, he was – actually, I’m not sure what he said he was going to do, run an errand or something. That was a while ago, though.”

“Can you call him?” Lucy pushes herself upright against the white hospital pillows with a grimace. “What if something happened?”

Wyatt gives her a wry look, as if to say that the only person she should be worrying about right now is herself, but pulls his phone out of his pocket, steps into the corridor, and dials Flynn. It rings once and then goes to voicemail. (Which, since this is Flynn, is just a long beep.)

Wyatt frowns. “Hey,” he says. “It’s me. Call me back, Lucy’s worried.”

With that, trying not to jump to conclusions just yet (even though, in his opinion, one can rarely go wrong suspecting the worst of Flynn) he heads back into the room, at least until the nurse comes in for Lucy’s morning checks and gives them the kind of look that means they should probably clear out. Since this is the same one unimpressed with Lucy’s taste in men last night, she says, ostensibly cheerily, “Is your husband here this morning, Mrs. Wallace?”

“I – no, I haven’t seen him yet.” Lucy manages a smile, while Wyatt drills a death glare into the back of Nurse Ratchet’s head; it is clear that only he gets to bag on Flynn for being late. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”

The nurse has an _uh-huh_ expression on her face, but doesn’t press it. Wyatt and Rufus are shooed into the corridor and out into the waiting room, tense and anxious and not sure what to do when half the team is down – one shot and the other incommunicado at the worst possible time. It’s not like they have day jobs they go to anymore; their entire existence is tied up in stopping Rittenhouse. Lucy is still here under a fake name, her rubbish husband is still a wanted fugitive and terrorist in the eyes of the U.S. government, and history could be turning on its head as soon as Rittenhouse takes the Mothership out again. As they manage a casual stroll out of the front doors and toward the nearest Starbucks – possibility of being busted or not, they are starving, and _not_ eating hospital food – Rufus hisses, “What the hell kind of stunt did Captain Craplord pull now?”

“I’m trying to figure that out,” Wyatt mutters back, as they join the insanely long line – is the entire orthopedics department on break at once? Because it sure looks like it – finally collect their drinks, and kick out a hipster from a corner table. The hipster gives them a baleful look, but Wyatt does not have time for his hurt feelings, and flashes his Army ID. “Hey, pal. National security. Write your novel somewhere else.”

The hipster gathers up his AirBook and scuttles off, not without a final look warning them that he is going to write a scathing blog post about the entitlement of the military-industrial complex later. Wyatt slides into his vacated seat and grabs his drink; he asked for two extra shots, and even that doesn’t feel like quite enough to kickstart his brain. He calls Flynn once more, just to be thorough, but this time it doesn’t even ring. He puts it down and says grimly, “Yeah. He’s gone.”

Rufus blows on his latte, then takes a slug. “Am I missing the part where that’s a problem?”

“I feel you there, buddy. Believe me.” Wyatt laughs, without humor. “But we’re already in trouble as it is. You’re our only pilot, so either way, if Rittenhouse jumps again, you have to be part of the Lifeboat crew. As we’ve noted, I can’t be in two places at the same time. Which means Lucy is either here by herself, or you go alone, and I can’t agree to that. But I can’t protect you both. We need Flynn back.”

Rufus opens his mouth, takes a drink of coffee instead of saying something, and then can’t hold back from pointing out the obvious corollary. “So what, he’s going to – what, come back and apologize? Look, I know why we were stuck with him. I know why we had to get him out of jail and even make him part of the team. Not that he ever wanted that, because he’s terrible, but whatever. But now Lucy’s hurt, we’re screwed, and he’s left us in the lurch. He made the choice to go. He clearly doesn’t give a damn about any of us. Good riddance.”

“I don’t know.” The last place Wyatt ever imagined he’d be is defending Flynn, but much as he hates it, he has been able to sense that the other man’s feelings for Lucy are real. Even if he knows absolutely nothing about how to express it. Too real, perhaps. Too terrifying. “You know what happened to his family, his wife and kid. He told me about it during the Watergate mission. Rittenhouse shot them while he was in the house, he heard the silencers. Found their bodies, but it was too late. I’m guessing… well. Seeing that same thing happen to Lucy right in front of him probably set him off a little.”

Rufus snorts. “A little?”

“Look, I’m not defending him. It was a pretty ass thing to do. I’m just saying, I don’t think he suddenly bailed because he decided he didn’t give a shit. I did – well, I did the same thing, after Jess.” Wyatt’s voice sticks in his throat, and Rufus meets his gaze with a troubled expression. “You just want to be far away from anywhere you think the pain can reach you. It does, though. It always does.”

“Hey, man.” Rufus puts a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah, it’s all right.” Wyatt sighs. “Like I said, I honestly get not wanting to go to the bother of finding him. But we do need him back, even if it’s going to take a lot of time we don’t really have to spare. And, well.” He hesitates. “Like it or not – and it’s definitely not – Lucy needs him back too. We can’t un-wrinkle reality, and they’re, well. You know.”

“Yeah. Married. Somehow.” Rufus blows out a breath. “We could just wait a few days and see if she gets over him.”

“I wish, but that’s still not our choice to make.” Wyatt is realizing what he’ll have to do, and sighs again. “Can you track his phone?”

“Maybe,” Rufus says dubiously. “It’ll be harder if he’s left the country, though. Or maybe he just hopped in the Lifeboat and peaced out to some other time permanently. Maybe that’s it,” he adds, sounding hopeful. “He can go back to his solo-operator thing and handle Rittenhouse, but we… probably can’t let Flynn deal with things his way. Shit.”

“Yeah, he sucks at it.” Wyatt gulps the rest of his coffee, winces as it burns on the way down, and – seeing another hipster covetously eyeing their table with its precious power outlet, and guessing they should hit the road – stands up. “Come on.”

He and Rufus head out, are tempted to go back to the hospital, but the nurse will just evil-eye them anyway and they have nothing to report to Lucy. So they make it back to the safe house, where Rufus boots up his myriad of computers and gets cracking. The last place he can triangulate Flynn’s phone is at SFO. After that, nada, but it doesn’t take too much guesswork to surmise his next move. The asshole got on a plane and assholed off God knows where.

“Really?” Rufus mutters, fingers flying over the keys, as he tries various combinations and algorithms of dubious legality (then again, it’s not like more bending of the rules is really something he’s worried about anymore) until he finally hacks into arrival-departure data for SFO’s main terminals this morning. Even an emotionally distraught Flynn is not dumb enough to travel under his real name, though there is the question of how he’d finesse the ID requirement (though someone who worked for the NSA probably knows how to bluff his way around that and/or pose as a government representative for whom the stormtroopers don’t need to see his identification). Finally, Rufus stops at a blinking name on a list. “Abraham Preston? _Really?”_

“As in, Lucy’s favorite president that he shot in front of her and her last name?” Wyatt is so exasperated by this choice of alias that he almost reconsiders the whole retrieval plan on the spot. “Why?”

“Don’t you have to wonder?” Rufus flags the name and downloads the file. “How the heck they got together?”

“I try not to.” This is for Lucy, Wyatt reminds himself. “Where did he go?”

“By the looks of things…” Rufus clicks through a few screens, muttering to himself about the government not even encrypting things properly. Really makes you feel as if your sensitive information is carefully protected. “JFK.”

“New York? The hell is he doing there?”

“Assuming that was his final destination. Don’t you have some special ops tricks? Call the TSA and get them to pull his passenger records?”

“That is… not a bad idea.” Wyatt supposes that at this point, the law doesn’t really enter it. So, while Rufus is monkeying around to see if he can crack into JFK’s servers or if they’re using a different protocol (or whatever computer-geek problem he needs to solve, this isn’t Wyatt’s lookout) he looks a few things up, makes a few calls, and finds no difficulty at all in informing the TSA chief that Abraham Preston is a dangerous individual with a predilection for making terrible decisions, who important people would like to talk to ASAP. This cuts quite a bit of red tape and the multiple levels of management Wyatt would have otherwise had to circumvent, but nothing can ever be easy when it comes to the feds. Finally, he gets the information that Mr. Preston (he snorts to himself) appears to have just left, as in minutes ago, on a Japan Airlines flight to Narita International Airport, Tokyo. Wyatt thanks him for the information, assures him that Delta Force is on it and the flight itself is not in danger, hangs up hastily, and informs Rufus.

“Are you serious?” Rufus looks as if this is probably a rhetorical question when it comes to Flynn, yes. “He flies east to New York, and then back across the whole country _and_ west to Tokyo? How does that make any sense?”

“Don’t look at me.” Wyatt rubs his temples. “Easier for me, though. If I get a flight to Tokyo right away, I might be able to make it soon after he does.”

Rufus still has plenty of comments under his breath about how tragic this whole affair is, which isn’t remotely wrong, but there is the problem of getting Wyatt to Japan first. There is a departure late this afternoon, which he will have to hustle if he wants to catch, and since they’ve already gone to the well once and there is no time to spare, he calls SFO and asks that they hold a seat for him, as a matter of urgent national security. If all this ever gets back to Pendleton, Wyatt’s goose is cooked, but frankly, he has bigger problems. Like tracking down Lucy’s utter failure of a spouse posthaste, then killing him himself.

This also means there isn’t any time for Wyatt to go back to the hospital and tell her about this, so he gives Rufus a look. “I’m sorry to stick you with this. Just… let her know that I’m doing my best, all right?”

“Why are you apologizing to me?” Rufus says dryly. “You’re the one that has to deal with Flynn.”

“Yeah. Not looking forward to that.” Wyatt is used to short-notice trips, after all, but in a time machine, not a plane. His life is weird. “I’ll let you know as soon as I get there. If Rittenhouse jumps while I’m gone…”

“I’ll go after them,” Rufus says. “Alone, if I have to. You know Lucy wouldn’t ever want us to do anything else.”

Wyatt knows this is true, even as he practically has hives at the thought of either leaving Lucy by herself in the hospital, or letting Rufus brave battling Rittenhouse by himself in the past. God, he’s going to wring Flynn’s _neck._ “Be – be careful, all right?”

“I’m not Delta Force or NSA, but I can handle myself.” Rufus holds out his hand, which Wyatt shakes, then pulls him into a brief hug. “See you soon.”

“Yeah,” Wyatt mutters. “I hope so.”

Once Wyatt has gone, Rufus picks up a few groceries, figuring Lucy will not be terribly keen on eating Jello and processed gloop either, sighs deeply, stares accusingly at the sky, and finally heads back to the hospital. He is very, very not looking forward to this conversation, and Lucy is awake, anxious, and apparently trying to convince the nurses that she’s all right to be released, no big deal. Considering that she still has a fairly sizeable hole in her side and was in emergency surgery last night, they are not buying it. As well, they have a few questions about the weapon that shot her. Ballistics testing has not been able to match it to any modern ammunition. It looks like a bullet from a rifle from, what, the 1860s?

“1870s, actually,” Rufus mutters, supposing it’s lucky that Lucy didn’t get nailed by any of the automatic rifles that Rittenhouse was supplying Custer’s doomed 7th with. If so – well, he doesn’t like to think about that. He and Lucy manage to fend off their questions for the time being, but it’s clear they can’t keep this up forever without the police being involved, and that is likewise a problem. When they’ve finally got the room to themselves, he drops into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs. “So, um,  Lucy. I have. . . something to tell you.”

A corner of her mouth quirks. “Does it involve why Wyatt’s not here now either?”

“Yeah, actually, it does.” Rufus rubs his face. “Flynn, well, he, he kind of skipped town. We found him – it took us a while, but we found where he’s going, I promise. Wyatt went to get him. But yeah, he. Decided to freelance again, I guess.”

Lucy’s face jerks, and then goes carefully, studiously expressionless. She looks away, twisting at the place on her left hand where her rings should be, and bites her lip. Rufus tries to respect her grief, even as he considers its object wholly unworthy of it, but he can’t help himself. “Lucy, how did – how did that even happen? You and him?”

Lucy looks up in startlement, before apparently reminding herself that he doesn’t remember. After a moment she says, rather hesitantly, “It was after the Yalta Conference mission.”

“Yalta Conference mission?”

“Yes. 1945, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill meet in the Crimea, just before the end of WWII.” Lucy gives him an odd look. “Surely you remember that?”

“No, I don’t.” Rufus is struck with the bizarre realization that they – himself, Flynn, and Wyatt – must remember one version of recent events, as Lucy said that they have been married for six months, and she must remember a completely different one. _Did_ they actually go to Yalta 1945, if he doesn’t remember that they did? As a result of whatever changed in Sarajevo 1914, the start of WWII’s predecessor, the mission from which they returned to find this matrimonial surprise in the first place? Lucy was affected by the changes, but they weren’t, since they made them to the timeline, even inadvertently, while she wasn’t there? The same reason she remembered Amy’s existence, while everyone in the present forgot it? Man, Rufus hates time travel.

“Okay,” he says, electing not to get too off track. “So, Yalta?”

“You really don’t remember?”

“No. Technically, this me wasn’t there.”

“Fine.” Lucy blows out a breath, clearly feeling doubly isolated. “Obviously, an event like that was huge for Rittenhouse to target, and I… I was just running really angry after everything that happened with my mom, and I… I kept pushing the envelope, I just wanted to hurt them, I didn’t care what it cost. He saw me doing it, and he… stopped me.”

“Wait, Flynn _stopped_ you from going metal on Rittenhouse? Are you sure? This wasn’t another alternate Flynn from Bizarro Reality where he’s a nice and well-adjusted guy?”

“No, it was him. He… he was angry with me, still, but he didn’t want to see me go down that same road. When we got back, he…” Lucy’s cheeks go pink. “He confronted me about it, and we ended up…”

“Yeah, I can guess what you ended up doing.” Just as well that Wyatt isn’t here to hear this, Rufus thinks, although he has to at least suspect. “And then you what, got married the next morning? This actually isn’t the past where you have to get married after you bang because of honor and all that, I’m sure you know that, since you are, after all, the historian. So why – ”

Lucy gives him a look, cutting off his babbling. “No, we didn’t. It wasn’t until after – ”

She stops.

“What?” Rufus prods, feeling like the town gossip who cannot keep their nose out of anyone’s business, but dying of curiosity nonetheless. “After what?”

“After the _Lusitania_ mission,” Lucy says quietly, having guessed from his expression that he doesn’t remember that one either. “1915. The men he killed on that one, the operatives Rittenhouse was using on that – they were the ones who killed his family. Lorena and Iris. He finally got to avenge them, and when we got back to the present… well. It was emotional, to say the least. And things might have gotten a little mixed up and… yeah. _That_ was the next morning where we kind of woke up married.”

“Wait, _what?”_ Rufus is mildly stunned. “So this whole time, Flynn actually _has_ killed the guys who killed his family? And doesn’t remember that either? Why didn’t you… I don’t know, tell him? It feels like it could have helped with all the meltdowns he was having.”

“Because now I don’t know if it happened!” Lucy turns to look at him, eyes filled with tears. “You obviously don’t remember anything I just told you about, none of you knew that Garcia and I were married, _he_ didn’t know we were married, and now we’re referring to two totally different time streams and sets of memories and no idea at all about how to reconcile them! You know he completely stonewalled me for two weeks after you guys got back from Sarajevo, I couldn’t even say an ordinary word to him, much less this! And now he’s only barely started to let me back in again, then he disappears, and this…” She trails off. “I may or may not get a chance to tell him at all, but when this Flynn finds out, I can’t help feeling that… he’ll think his job is done. He won’t forgive me for keeping it a secret, he’ll decide we can handle the rest of Rittenhouse on our own, and he’ll… he’ll leave.”

 _Oh._ Rufus understands, unfortunately and unpleasantly. And while Flynn leaving is exactly what he should want, and still does to some degree, he knows it would shatter Lucy if it came about like this.  She can’t tell Flynn because, as noted, there’s no way to know if it still happened in this new reality, and because it would be cold and paltry satisfaction indeed, when this Flynn doesn’t even remember doing it, when he never actually has. The only thing worse than not telling him would be letting him believe that he _had_ done it, giving him false hope, that he could rest at last, and then finding out that no, those men are still alive. And because Lucy cannot rid herself of the insidious conviction that Flynn would far prefer a universe where he looked into the eyes of the men who killed Lorena and Iris in cold blood, remembered their faces and their deaths, and where he is not married to her. Not this, where he doesn’t remember either. Where he has fairly earned neither his vengeance for the past nor his hope for the future, neither his grief nor his joy. When it is all a dream for him, and he could still be hoping that sometime soon, he’ll wake.

“I…” Rufus says at last. Reaches over and takes Lucy’s hand. “I’m sorry, okay? But… evidently he stuck around even after finding that out. Unless he didn’t, and we had to drag him back already – which wouldn’t surprise me. Why did he stay?”

“He… well, yes, he was a little surprised to find out we were married the first time, too.” Lucy looks wry. “But he said that he didn’t think the job was done, that we needed to take out the rest of Rittenhouse too. And, well, he said that he supposed we were married now, and if I wanted to not be married, I could say so. But I, uh. Didn’t exactly let him finish.” She coughs. “So he bought me a real engagement ring and we had a new ceremony a few weeks later.”

Rufus supposes this is actually quite a romantic and poignant story, so much that you can almost forget Flynn is involved. “So he… he chose to stay married before, right? And to let go of the whole vengeance thing, and keep fighting Rittenhouse because it was the right thing to do? And otherwise, you know… be happy?” He doesn’t know if it’s their fault for mucking it up or not, when yet again, you have that pesky “which version of events actually happened?” brain-buster. “And then you got reset to total ground zero and stuck with the version of him that sucks. Wow, Lucy. You did not deserve that.”

“I don’t know if it’s about deserving.” She stares out the window, at dusk falling over the glittering lights of San Francisco. “I don’t know if we can get it back.”

“He chose it once,” Rufus says. “Maybe he can again. I don’t know.”

“Maybe.” Lucy gives him a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. It’s clear she thinks they might have lost their chance. “First, we have to see if Wyatt can catch up to him.”

“He definitely can,” Rufus says stoutly. “I have faith in Wyatt.”

“Just none in Flynn?” Lucy clearly catches the unspoken implication.

“Not really.”

“I don’t know if I should either, honestly.” Her eyes go dark, distant, far away. “But I can’t help it. I just – I just. I just really want him to come back.”

* * *

Garcia Flynn hates the almighty, ever-living, absolutely-not-a-single-one-given _fuck_ out of Tokyo.

He can barely remember what possessed him to come here in the first place, and the last few days are sufficiently hazy that he’s still confused about having traveled somewhere that isn’t in the past. He took the first flight from San Francisco to New York, got another one, picked Japan because it was on top of the departures board and sounded as if it was the furthest away, and now, after God alone knows how many hours of flying across multiple directions, time zones, and continents, he’s here. It is utterly disorienting. He can just about read Chinese, because if you deal with Russia as long as he has, you inevitably deal with China as well, but that does him no good with Japanese. The city goes on forever, and for a man who has spent most of his life in covert ops, where the entire point is _hiding_ , he is as conspicuous as a heart attack. Six-foot-four men stand out anywhere, but especially in Japan. Staring isn’t considered rude in Asian culture, and _everyone_ is staring at him. He turned around too fast in a store and almost flattened some tiny Japanese granny, whose nose reached to about his navel. This is a country built for midgets. He feels like he’s parting the Red Sea when he walks down the sidewalk.

Flynn is also not in the least a fan of all the cutesy Hello Kitty-style kitsch that seems to predominate everywhere, the fact that riding the subway (especially at rush hour) involves pretty much literally taking your life in your hands, and that no matter where he wanders in this gleaming, futuristic city, the complete antithesis of everything to do with the past, he never feels remotely better. If anything, he feels worse. He hasn’t done anything but fight Rittenhouse for too long to remember, and he can’t relax. Keeps wondering what they’ve done, if they’ve taken the Mothership on another jump, what the hell the trio is going to do about it if so. Christ, he’s even found himself worrying about _Wyatt._ Things are clearly upside-down.

And Lucy.

Flynn doesn’t even need to force himself to be honest (which is good, otherwise he might never get there) to be confronted with the fact that he has felt like he wants to die every hour, every minute, every _second_ since he left her. He has drearily struggled to rehearse the rationalizations, everything he worked out about how it was the best choice, but that barely compensates for the knot of agony in his chest that hasn’t loosened its grip at all. If anything, it’s getting tighter. Still more, he knows that it was the coward’s way out, and Lucy will be so angry with him for doing it that he has likely burned any bridges back. He’ll just… he has no notion. He’s at the end of his rope. He just wants to go to bed and sleep for five years. Maybe forever.

Flynn supposes that he could work on identifying Rittenhouse members in the present, try to disrupt their operations and their ability to run more missions interfering with the past, as that is essentially his only marketable skill set at this point, and might even be tangentially useful for the Time Team. He doesn’t know what to do with his life if he’s not chasing them. Lucy started that too, and now he’s lost her too. No more than he deserves, really.

Presently, Flynn has gotten buzzed at a sake bar, but not very much, as it takes a lot to get him drunk and he was tired of being gawped at by the locals. He has bought a room in a grimy hostel in the bar district (well, grimy by Japanese standards, which would still be shockingly clean for budget accommodation anywhere else) and he’s half-hoping some mugger with a death wish will try to jump him (they’d have to jump very high). He could do with beating the shit out of someone, even if this is liable to get him dragged before the prefecture police, and accordingly cause more complications. He’s drunk just enough to have a headache, and he is in a vindictively foul mood. Fine, just let them, let _anyone,_ he doesn’t care, he just wants it to –

At that moment, someone steps out of the alley in front of him. Flynn can’t help but wondering wildly if his request for a mugging was granted after all, even if the joke’s on them, as he has nothing worth stealing. He reflexively loads up for a punch – and then catches sight of the newcomer in the glow of the neon sign from the takeout rice place ahead, and freezes.

 _“You?”_ His tongue is still too thick, but the shock cuts through his head like a circular saw. “What the – _what the fuck are you doing here?”_

“What’s it look like?” Wyatt Logan glares back at him, blue eyes almost red in the reflected glare, giving him a momentarily hellish aspect. “Tracking down your dumb ass!”

“How did – ” Flynn isn’t sure if he stopped trying to hit him too early. “How did you – ”

“How did I find you?” Wyatt repeats, clearly vastly underwhelmed by the sheer disastrous nature of this whole situation. “Well, aside from the fact that I obviously have a few connections, _Abraham Preston,_ it looks like you completely half-assed this whole thing. Don’t tell me that someone who worked for the NSA for most of his life, and who went off the grid for two years before he stole the Mothership, doesn’t know how to properly disappear. Instead you use the most obvious fake name possible, then go to the one place you will literally be remembered by everyone you meet. You want to know how I found you? Just asked if anyone had seen a tall, crazy-looking white man. Took me about three hours, tops, since I got from the airport. It almost looks, oddly enough, like your heart’s not in this at all.”

“I – ” Flynn opens his mouth, then shuts it with a click. “Why did you come after me?”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.” Wyatt folds his arms. “Why do you fucking think I came after you?”

“I – thought you’d just – ”

“Yeah. I’m sure you thought a lot. And I’m also sure it was mind-meltingly stupid, but hey, what’s it matter?” Wyatt is angrier than Flynn has ever seen him. “Rufus and I have been busting our _asses_ trying to fix all your problems, worrying about Lucy, about what we’re going to do if Rittenhouse jumps again, and you’re – what? Enjoying some geisha girls and anime?”

Flynn bristles. “I am _not_ cheating on Lucy, I didn’t – ”

“Oh, so it’s cheating on her now?” Wyatt yells, as heads start to appear on the balconies in the buildings above the narrow alley. “When you’re still, as far as I know, trying to reject this whole marriage as hard as you can? You didn’t cheat on her, hey, no, you just ran away? Gold star!”

“Wyatt, just – ”

“No. _No,_ you do not get to say anything. I’m here because of Lucy. Not because of you. Rufus thought we should just leave you down whatever rabbit hole you’d dug for yourself, and frankly, I wanted to agree with him. But since you’ve fucked all of us now, not just one of us, I had to come and see if there was any hope of salvaging anything. You know what? Now that I’m here, I’m really not sure why I bothered. Go get drunk and run away. Fine. The rest of us might be screwed, but at least we try to fix our own problems.”

Flynn can feel a faint heat rising up his throat, stinging his cheeks. “Wyatt – ”

“If you’re interested in apologizing, I’m not interested in hearing it.” The younger man regards him with a gaze that has turned to chips of flint. “I’m not even the person you owe it to. That’s Lucy. She loves you, you stupid son of a bitch. She loves you more than I’ve seen her love just about anyone, however that happened, and you’re breaking her heart. If you think that doesn’t matter, just say so. Save all of us some time and trouble.”

Flynn feels as if he has been run over by a steamroller. He turns away, unable to meet Wyatt’s eyes head-on, rubbing a hand over his face. He had words, an answer, he swears, but that just blew all of them to pieces. He has never hated himself more than he presently does, he knows he can’t justify his actions in any way that would satisfy Wyatt, and any less to himself. And yet –

“I can’t protect her,” he says. “I can’t protect her. She got shot right in front of me. It could happen again, I could lose her too, and I – ”

“So what?” Wyatt has absolutely no interest in sparing his feelings. “You’ll run away, and she’ll – not get shot? Yeah, you’ll do a bang-up job protecting her from five thousand miles away, you fucking moron. Tell me, is there any logic _anywhere_ in your decisions? Any? The smallest bit?”

Flynn has absolutely no reply. They stand there staring each other down (or rather, Wyatt stares, as Flynn still can’t look at him straight) for a horribly long moment. A hundred potential scenarios run through Flynn’s head, a thousand. None of them end with Lucy kissing him and telling him she’s just glad to see him, that they can put this behind them and start fresh. None of them end with him allowing himself to believe that, even if she did.

“Well?” Wyatt snaps, when he doesn’t say anything. “Are you coming back, or do I just leave you to whatever other terrible decisions you somehow haven’t made yet?”

“I…” Flynn swallows hard, still feeling as if there’s a sizeable chunk of shrapnel lodged in his chest. “The former.”

Wyatt is caught off guard. Then he says shortly, “That doesn’t necessarily exclude more terrible decisions, I suppose. And you have not even started to fix things, believe me. But I suppose that is, statistically speaking, the lesser of the shitty options you could have taken. Come on.”

Flynn has absolutely no idea what time it is by the time they finally land in San Francisco, his third flight (and second long-haul international flight) in about as many days. They went backward over the International Date Line, so it’s technically yesterday from whenever they left Tokyo, and even his well-calibrated internal clock, which has to deal with much larger time jumps on a regular basis, is hopelessly scrambled. He slept a little on the plane, but not much, and he’s practically floating. Whatever is about to happen next, he just wants it over with.

Wyatt checks his phone as soon as they are allowed to turn on their electronics, and tersely reports that according to Rufus, Rittenhouse still hasn’t jumped again. This is baffling to both Flynn and Wyatt – someone surely saw Lucy shot in 1876, they have to know she’s on the shelf, that the Time Team is distracted and divided – and more than a little suspicious. If they haven’t, it’s because they think there is something they can more profitably be doing in the present, and _that’s_ not terrifying at all.

Despite his singular level of fatigue – a flattening brew of emotional exhaustion, double-whammy jetlag, sleep deprivation, and Japanese misadventures –Flynn is antsy to get to the hospital and see Lucy, even though he’s quite sure she will not want to see him, and that the conversation could quite justifiably be started off by slapping him until his ears ring. He and Wyatt catch a cab, at which Flynn dozes off in the back while they’re stuck in traffic, and has to be woken with a start thirty minutes later. They stumble into the hospital foyer looking practically like intake candidates themselves, and Flynn reels. “Go tell Lucy I’ll be right up,” he says. “I need a minute.”

Wyatt gives him a cold fish-eye.

“Yeah, I know. The last time I said that, I – never mind. But I think it’s obvious I’m not going to do that again, and it’s probably better that you warn her, rather than that I just walk in out of the blue. All right?”

Wyatt continues to stare evilly at him, with the clear indication that if Flynn takes so much as a single step out of this hospital, he, Wyatt, will shoot him on the spot and dump him in a shallow grave. At last, however, he jerks his head once, and heads for the elevator. Calls over his shoulder, “Five minutes. Then you better be up there.”

Flynn grunts in assent and heads into the men’s room, staring at himself in the mirror. Under the harsh fluorescents, he looks mostly like a corpse himself, and splashing cold water on his face barely helps. He is so tired that even death would feel like a light nap. He isn’t ready for whatever Lucy is going to say to him, even knowing he deserves it. God. He really could not possibly have fucked that up more. Maybe at least she’ll finally be free of him, his cracks and his catastrophes and his endless mistakes. She deserves that.

Still. He has come this far. He has to finish the job.

Flynn splashes one more round of water on his face, and straightens up. He’s just reached over to dry his hands when the bathroom door opens, then shuts. He looks up, uninterested, and then –

“Hello, Mr. Flynn.” Benjamin Cahill reaches to lock the door behind him, and holds up his hands to show that he’s unarmed. “We’ve been waiting for you to come back.”

“Wh – ” Flynn can’t even get the word out. He tries to take a step, but his feet have dissociated from his sparking, malfunctioning brain. “You bastards – you _fucking_ bastards have been watching the hospital this whole time?”

“Of course we were. Can’t a father be concerned for his daughter?” Cahill looks genuinely wounded. “I do care very much about Lucy, I heard what happened at Little Bighorn, and I had to ensure that that unfortunate slip-up wasn’t going to lead to any more permanent –”

“Shut up.” Flynn’s fingers flex. He’s fairly sure he could make at least a start at strangling him, but there have to be more of them outside. _“Shut up.”_

Cahill looks at him with a faint smile and raised eyebrow. “Listen to me, Mr. Flynn.”

“Fuck you.”

 _“Listen to me._ There’s something you need to know. About your wife.”

Despite everything, that catches Flynn like a brick across the face. “What?” he blurts. “Lucy?”

Cahill’s other eyebrow raises at that. The silence briefly turns horrendous, and then he shakes his head. “No,” he says simply. “The other one.”


	6. Chapter 6

Flynn’s first instinct is to reach for his gun. His second instinct to remember that he doesn’t have one, and that even if so, he is not exactly going to be able to shoot his way through a hospital and however many goons Rittenhouse must have outside. Especially when, as the realisation chokes his throat, he doesn’t know where Lucy is. If they’re holding her hostage in her room upstairs, if they’ve already done something worse to Wyatt and Rufus – and yet, even if he did have a gun, even if he was prepared to blast the entire place, he wouldn’t. He remains frozen, knowing that this is absolutely a trap or trick or lie of some sort, but unable to do anything else than stare back at Benjamin Cahill. “What?” he says croakily,  too stunned to pretend. “What about Lorena?”

“Do you want to listen to me, then?” Lucy’s father – _how_ could this man have ever made anything, anyone like her? – arches an eyebrow. “Because we can, Garcia. We can talk this through. You just have to do your part.”

Flynn hates this chummy, favorite-uncle act with his entire heart, even more that the bastard thinks he can call him by his first name as if they’re old friends, but his tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. He casts an eye at the paper-towel dispenser, calculating his odds of tearing it off the wall and using it as a makeshift weapon – he could possibly concuss Cahill with it, yes, but it wouldn’t do him any good against the legions outside. It’s not exactly bulletproof. He’s still reeling with jet lag and sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion, and he knows himself well enough to admit that there is no way he can bash his way out of this one. His fists have been clenched, but at that, they slowly, feebly unfold.

Seeing it, Cahill looks satisfied. “That’s better. You know, this really isn’t any place for an important conversation. How about we go get a drink somewhere, and – “

“No,” Flynn grates out. Like hell is he letting Rittenhouse squirrel him off somewhere alone, possibly with a nice chaser of cyanide in the cocktail if they feel he isn’t being amenable enough to their ideas (which it is almost guaranteed he won’t be). They must need him alive, they must need something from him, which is why Cahill didn’t just pull out a sidearm and take quick and decisive advantage of finding his organization’s biggest enemy alone, unarmed, and disoriented in a public restroom. “We talk here.”

Cahill blinks. “Are you sure you don’t want to – ”

_“What did you do with Lucy?”_

“As I said, my daughter is currently receiving the best care that money can buy. I went by the front desk – it seems she checked in under the last name of Wallace, that of her stepfather – and told them that anything she needed for her treatment, I would be sure it was paid for. Anything she needed. I’m not a monster either. I’m also a father who loves his daughter.”

Despite himself, Flynn flinches at that. He scrubs his hands over his face again, struggling to muster up any kind of witty or coherent reply. He feels toyed with, the mouse scuttling to and fro under a cat’s batting paws, and he doesn’t like it at all – he is the one who hunts Rittenhouse, not the other way around. “You’re taking your sweet time to get to the point, aren’t you?” he rasps at last. “Just tell me what the fuck you think you have that matters to me.”

Cahill looks straight at him. “The identity of the operatives who killed your wife and daughter. And what happened – or can happen – to them, if you’re interested. Are you?”

Flynn feels punched. At last, all he can manage is, “And you’d sell your own men out, why?”

“It’s more complicated than that.” Cahill presses a button on his watch, presumably to deactivate some secret alarm that was supposed to go off if he had been in the bathroom with Flynn too long without responding. “You see, strictly speaking, they’re dead.”

Flynn was just briefly beginning to entertain the notion that he might have any idea what’s going on. At that, he has to dismiss it again post-haste. “The hell do you. . . ”

“You killed them,” Cahill says, with a slight shrug. “You don’t remember?”

“Of course I don’t, because I never – ”

“As a result of you changing history on the Sarajevo mission in 1914,” Cahill says, talking over him, “it bled over into the Lusitania mission, the next year in 1915, and where you killed the men who had carried out the order on Lorena and Iris. So – ”

“Don’t you _dare_ say their names!” Flynn is even more lost, because he doesn’t remember any Lusitania mission, but he’s not about to get hung up on such trivialities. He wants to throttle Cahill up one side and down the other, but he still can’t. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash unfold, hurtling and hurtling toward what inevitable end (or cement wall) the son of a bitch has in mind. He can just stand here, in a nightmare, and let it happen.

“In the new timeline, therefore,” Cahill finishes up, “that is how you and my daughter appear to have. . .  ended up together. After you killed those men and apparently found it within you to move on. She never told you, did she?”

Flynn has been wondering how on earth he and Lucy would have ended up married – he would have guessed a number of other things, but not that – and he can’t help a flicker of curiosity, not that he’s going to trust any version of events they give him. Still, he’s unable to deny it as easily as he wants to, for any number of reasons. “Lucy would have told me,” he says at last, reflexively, not even knowing why he believes it. Not as if he’s given her much opportunity, or hint that he’d be open to hearing it. “She would have told me.”

“I’m afraid she didn’t.” Cahill shakes his head. The faux sympathy is nearly thick enough to slip in, Flynn thinks loathingly. “As you can imagine, Rittenhouse has quite sophisticated mechanisms in place to track any changes or alterations to the timeline and our own operation, and I can independently verify everything I’ve just told you. You must have known that either Lucy didn’t want to tell you, or was afraid to tell you, and either way, that’s no foundation for a relationship, is it? It’s just an accident of fate that has thrown you together, and seeing as you’ve been trying to reject it as hard as you can, I know you’ll do what both of us know is the right thing. Difficult as it may be for you to comprehend,” he adds, rather scathingly. “You know, there were plenty of the brass who just wanted you dead, but because I do care about Lucy and want to see her happy, even in an unfortunate matter like this, I proposed a different approach.”

“You know,” Flynn says, lip curling, “that’s the what – third or fourth time in this conversation that you’ve insisted how much you care about her? It’s almost as if you think I might not believe you when you say it.”

“I wish it could have been different,” Cahill says, in the tone of a candid admission that is clearly supposed to make Flynn think he is being humble and reasonable about this. Flynn himself is not an expert on being reasonable about anything, but he is still perfectly capable of smelling bullshit. “But for once here, our interests are united. Do one small thing for us, one favor to reset the timeline to the one where you aren’t married, just as you want. Right now, the operatives who killed your family are dead, but your wife and daughter aren’t back, because you killed them after they already had carried out the hit. I will give you their names and their birth dates, as well as the names of their parents. We will allow you twenty-four hours of no interference, for you to do exactly as you wish with this intelligence. Once you have, I presume, killed their parents, they won’t be born, the Lusitania mission won’t take place as it did, and history will unbend. You will no longer be married to Lucy, and Lorena and Iris will be back. Just as you want.”

Flynn’s mouth is dry as sand. He wants to say Cahill is lying, because he’s Rittenhouse to the bone, of course he’s lying. “So you’d just let me kill two of your men. Why?”

“We have plenty of men.” Cahill shrugs. “You know that. These two aren’t anything special or irreplaceable. They’ve had a few disciplinary problems anyway. As the CEO of my division, I can make a decision which employees are expendable.”

“Usually that means handing out pink slips,” Flynn sneers. “Not death sentences.”

“Do you suddenly have a problem with killing our members yourself?” Cahill snaps, dropping the urbane, nice-suburban-dad act for a moment. “Please, don’t try that to my face.”

“I don’t, no.”

“So. . . ?”

“What do you want from me?” Flynn knows this isn’t being offered freely, knows there must be a poisoned hook dangling somewhere, but he’s tempted. God, he’s so terribly tempted, and he has no idea what he’s going to end up doing. “To go away and pinky-promise never to interfere in Rittenhouse’s business ever again?”

“That would be the gist, yes. As long as you remained totally removed from our operations in any capacity, you, Lorena, and Iris would be guaranteed your safety, as well as a large payout  for your trouble. Starting at seven figures. Enough to buy you all new identities, a new house, a new start. We’re very good at that sort of thing. Anywhere in the world you want to go. Paris penthouse? Malibu mansion? You can give them everything, Garcia. You still can.”

Flynn turns away, gripping the edge of the sink until he’s half afraid it will break off. He never got into this insane mission intending to kill _all_ of Rittenhouse. Just as much as he needed to, to ensure that the events of the night of July 7, 2014 never happened. He thinks of dancing with Lorena on the balcony of a new house, of seeing Iris turn six, seven, eight, more. Thinks of watching her graduate from high school, from college. Of walking her down the aisle at her wedding. Of all the time she should have had, paid back to her. Rittenhouse owes them that, at least. If they’re willing – they’re liars, but if they’re willing –

“Are you interested?” Cahill says, when Flynn has no answer. “Well?”

“I. . . ” His voice is a croak. “Lucy. If I said yes. What’s going to happen to Lucy?”

“Lucy will have the wonderful life she was always meant to. She can get out of this terrible, draining business of running here and there through time. She’ll be a renowned and respected history professor. Just like you, she’ll have everything she wants.”

“Everything Rittenhouse wants, you mean.”

“I think we’ve established that doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

Have they? Flynn isn’t sure. No wonder Cahill thinks this is a good deal – the lives of two low-level grunts, who are technically already dead, in exchange for Rittenhouse having a clear playing field. He must be unable to believe his luck, that he might be able to purchase world domination so easily, because Garcia Flynn – the single greatest nemesis Rittenhouse has ever had – is standing here seriously considering their settlement offer, to take the handout and go before they change their minds. When you can give even your sworn enemies exactly what they want, no wonder absolute power is almost, tantalizingly within your grasp.

He wants it. He can’t deny he wants it more than anything, if only he could forget who was offering it. The possibility that if it suits their needs, they could yank it away for a second time, as nonchalantly as they gave it back. Flynn doesn’t trust any Rittenhouse guarantees of safety as far as he could wad them up and throw them. And yet, at the very heart, that is not what is forming the core of his final objection. It’s the idea that he would buy this, his happy ending, his returned family, the one thing he has always sworn he’d do anything for, by hand-delivering Lucy to these bastards. Made to live the life Rittenhouse wants, writing the history Rittenhouse makes, doubtless marrying the handsome Rittenhouse doctor they match her with and having several Rittenhouse children. To exist in Rittenhouse’s machine, and to know the entire time that he was just fine with putting her there. After everything.

Flynn tells himself that this should not matter.

(It matters.)

“Well?” Cahill says. It’s clear that he considers this all over except for the haggling. He holds out his hand. “How about we do some business, Mr. Flynn?”

Flynn stares at that hand. There is a possibility – remote, but still a possibility – that if he takes it, his long nightmare will be over. He will wake up in bed next to Lorena, and Iris will run in to jump on them. They will all eat breakfast and talk about ordinary things, not time travel and murder and sinister intergenerational organizations and the rewriting of history. They might not know anything was ever wrong, and he’s briefly curious as to how a restored timeline would explain his nearly three-year absence, if they’ll have happy memories of an uninterrupted existence, or something else. He can find out. He can find out everything.

All he has to do is shake Benjamin Cahill’s hand.

“Come on,” Cahill says, as if coaxing a skittish dog out from under the bed. “We both know it’s the best thing for Lucy too, for you to take this. Things got a little mixed up, you thought some things that weren’t real, and so did she. Just let us sort it out. Rittenhouse is a family business. That’s our values. We’ll do right by her.”

“Family business?” That, somehow, strikes something through Flynn’s catatonia. Sounds like the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar energy conglomerate at the site of an oil spill, lying though his teeth about how much they care about this disaster and everyone it’s affected, pledging to never do it again. “A family business. Just like the mom-and-pop hardware store on Main Street, that’s you. If only you had brochures. Glossy posters. I’m sure it would go great on the front.”

“Well,” Cahill says again, with a forced chuckle. “Not really our style, but I suppose there’s always room to – ”

“A family business,” Flynn repeats, for a third time. “That sent a squad of hitmen armed with military-grade automatic weapons to my house in the middle of the night, to kill my five-year-old little girl in her princess pajamas, and my wife, because I cottoned onto them. In case it escaped your notice, _Benjamin,_ that’s who you work for. That’s who you’d ask me to trust with their future.”

Cahill is starting to sweat. “I agree. That was an excessive response. I didn’t give that order, and we disciplined the asset who did. So – ”

“Disciplined? A write-up in his file and a few percentage points off his stock share?” Flynn’s roar rattles the mirrors. All at once, whatever trance he’s been in, this sweet, sweet impossible dream, it snaps. He doesn’t know if he’s throwing away his last chance to save Lorena and Iris, but he does know that he’s not, he’s never, he can barely believe that he was actually so terribly close to doing it like this. As Cahill senses danger an instant too late and fumbles for the buzzer on his wrist, Flynn grabs his arm, yanks it over his head, and with the other hand, crushes his fist violently into the bastard’s smug, avuncular expression.

Cahill yelps as his nose breaks with a crunch, flailing at him ineffectively, as Flynn hoists him by the expensive suit jacket and throws him bodily into the wall of sinks. There’s a crash of breaking porcelain and a hiss of spouting water, Cahill’s head slumps, and Flynn is left to consider luridly that if this is not actually the worst it has ever gone when meeting the in-laws for the first time, it has to be pretty damn close. He has an utterly ridiculous urge to laugh. Then he runs.

He bursts out of the restroom, remembers in the nick of time that the lobby must be crawling with Rittenhouse agents and there are about thirty more seconds until they discover their boss bashed over the head with a urinal, and if he surfaces in the middle of them like a surfer among a posse of great white sharks, this will all be useless anyway. He skids to a halt, reverses direction, and runs to the back corridor and one of the service elevators. He slams the button and swears at it, just before a harried and overworked resident in scrubs rounds the corner, sees a large and agitated man with bloody knuckles, a rumpled suit, and a, to say the least, unbalanced expression, and stares. “Sir. Sir, this is not a patient or visitor area, I have to ask you to – “

“GET IN THE ELEVATOR!” Flynn is going to need some sort of expert help or override to get into Lucy’s room, and if this puny underling makes a single move for his walkie-talkie, he is going to deeply regret it. “NOW!”

“Sir, one more warning, and then I’m – ”

Flynn lunges for him, shreds the buzzer off him, and snatches for his hospital ID/access card, just as the elevator door dings and opens. A few nurses shuffle out, at the end of their shift and too intent on making it to the hospital cafe alive to even notice their sputtering colleague being literally held up by a lunatic, and Flynn forces him inside before they have time to remedy that oversight. “Floor 8,” he snarls, jabbing the button and swiping the card. “Or else!”

The door shuts, they start to rise, and Flynn sees the resident eyeing the emergency call button. “Don’t,” he advises, “even think about it.”

“Are you crazy?” The resident clearly decides that is a stupid question the instant it is out of his mouth. “You’re in so much trouble, man, I don’t know who you think you are, but – ”

“Just call me Dr. Kovac,” Flynn grunts, wondering if all hospital elevators go this slowly or it is just a conspiracy against him. If this stops at another floor, he’ll – well, he’ll solve that problem later. After forty-eight of the longest seconds of his life, they reach the eighth floor and march out into the recovery ward. Flynn can’t physically drag his hostage without setting off a full-house alarm, but he keeps the pace brisk and the looks threatening. If she’s not here, if they’ve already moved her –

They turn down the hall to Lucy’s room, where Wyatt is perched on an uncomfortable chair – or rather, just getting off it, as he is clearly under the impression that Flynn has absconded again and will need to be dragged back by his ear. Upon seeing Flynn racing toward him with a very unhappy employee of this fine medical establishment instead, he goes blank, then furious. “Jesus _Christ,_ what are you – ”

“Shut up!” Flynn restrains himself from throttling the shorter man with a terrible effort. “They’re downstairs, they’re here, they’re all here! _He’s_ here too! Her father!”

Wyatt’s eyes flick from Flynn’s bloody knuckles to his face to his general demeanor. For once, mercifully, he is quick on the uptake. He wheels around as Flynn swipes the card into Lucy’s room, more than half expecting to see some Rittenhouse agent propped up in her bed and wearing her nightgown, like the wolf after eating Little Red Riding Hood. But it’s just her and Rufus, apparently none the wiser, as they stare and Rufus jumps to his feet. “Flynn?! You have the absolute _hell_ of a lot of nerve to just – ”

Flynn is aware of the fact that he will be and probably deeply deserves to be yelled at in great detail, but now is not the time. “Rittenhouse,” he says. “They’re downstairs. They’re waiting for us. It was a trap. We need to get out of here right now.”

“Lucy isn’t – ”

“They’re here?” Lucy interrupts, looking stranger – and angrier – than any of them have ever seen her. “What, to collect me?”

“I’ll tell you. Later.” This is the least thing from a tactful or tender reunion, not that Flynn was expecting one of those anyway. “Your wretched father, he – ”

“Benjamin Cahill’s here?” At the mention of the donor of (unfortunately) half her DNA, Lucy’s nostrils flare. She goes ice-white, momentarily mute, as Flynn casts an edgy eye for any SWAT teams rappelling off the roof and through the window. Then Lucy spins to face the resident, who has clearly been hoping that if he closes his eyes and blinks hard, this will all go away. “Take me off all this. Now.”

“Mrs. Wallace, the hospital still has not recommended you for discharge, and even if they had, it would be a serious breach of professional standards to allow you to accompany these total – ”

“I am ignoring medical advice. You can put that on the record.” Lips grim and furious, Lucy holds out her arm with the IV and heart monitor. _“Now!”_

She sounds impressively like her husband when she says this, which is possibly what makes the resident jump, scuttle over, and obey. He unhooks Lucy as fast as he can from the various machines and drips, as they can hear raised voices in the corridor outside. Lucy slides off the bed and runs to Flynn, who gathers her up automatically, and Wyatt draws his gun. Then, with Rufus grabbing a fistful of syringes off a nearby tray, apparently to porcupine any oncoming Rittenhouse agents to death, Wyatt jerks the door open, they leave the resident to probably be put into Lucy’s vacated bed in her place, and book it.

They reach the end of the corridor, force their way through a secured door after Rufus disables the alarm in ten seconds flat, and race flat-footed down the back stairs. Lucy clings to Flynn’s neck, his arms hooked around her back and under her knees, and he briefly considers carrying her fireman-style instead of bridal-style, but decides that that would put too much pressure on her still-raw gunshot wound. It’s been cleaned and stitched and bandaged, of course, but she’s not about to compete in any triathlons or anything of the sort any time soon. She catches his eye as they reach the landing, clatter down the next flight of steps, and pick up speed, and he can tell that when and if they get out of this alive, she is very much intending to shout at him thoroughly. Fine, then. He’s almost looking forward to it.

They reach the ground floor, spill out a fire exit into an alley, and realize that seeing as Rittenhouse probably has all the hospitals in the city, and the entire Bay Area, under surveillance, there’s no way they can just drive to another one and check in. There is only one way to buy them some time, literally. They can’t go back too far, as there is a certain point at which medical care will regress to the prescribe-strong-opiates-and-hope-for-the-best sort of thing, and since Flynn, the oldest member of the team, was born in 1974, they have to go before that if they’re traveling together. As to where, or when, that might be, well –

He holds her tighter. They can hear sirens. It’s odd, and it’s terrible that it’s happened like this, but they are all, at this moment, finally and unquestionably on the same side. Go figure.

They need to get to the Lifeboat. If Rittenhouse hasn’t found it already. It’s their only chance.

And so – the Time Team in arms, for the first time, as a full and formidable foursome – they do.

* * *

 _Where_ ends up being a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada, and _when_ is 1967. This is about the most out-of-the-way place anyone can think of, nothing interesting happening for miles, nothing major of any kind to draw Rittenhouse’s attention, and while it’s not a permanent refuge, it may at least allow them to catch their breath. Lucy is checked into the tiny local clinic with a farmer whose foot was run over by a tractor, and Flynn, Wyatt, and Rufus sit tersely in the wood-paneled lobby, listening to the clack of the beehived receptionist’s typewriter as she regards them judgmentally from behind her cat-eye glasses; it could not be any clearer that they are Not From Around Here. But since it’s Canada, she’s polite about it. Besides, it’s ‘67. Young American men aren’t exactly an uncommon sight up here, draft-dodging from ‘Nam. As for Flynn, she probably thinks he’s a commie, but Flynn gives that unavoidable impression wherever he goes.

At last, since sexism is also what the sixties are about, the doctor comes out in his Coke-bottle glasses and white jacket, and asks which of them is Lucy’s husband. Flynn glances almost diffidently at Wyatt, giving him the chance to volunteer – it seems to make more sense, that way, especially after Wyatt has gone through on her behalf. But Wyatt stares just as determinedly back at him, perhaps also intending to be sure that Flynn gets the chewing-out he properly deserves, and so, Flynn sighs deeply and gets to his feet. He follows the doctor back to an even tinier office, where the man turns and asks, “How did your wife get shot? It’s clearly been tended already, and quite well, but for the purposes of the record – ”

Flynn mulls a number of potential answers to that question, among them a certain annoyance that he is expected to explain, when Lucy is a bit drained and tired and has lost some blood and her father is a raging dick, but otherwise compos mentis and perfectly capable of doing it herself. So he shrugs. “She was shot in 1876, at the Battle of Little Bighorn,” he says. “We were there because we were trying to stop Rittenhouse from changing the outcome. We managed that, but she was hurt in the process. So we traveled back to 2017 in our time machine and got her to the hospital, but after some. . .  difficulties, her father, who’s one of the highest-ranking evil bastards in Rittenhouse, found us there. We had to jump here because we hoped it would be the safest. Oh, and nobody is ever going to wear mustard-colored tweed again after this abortion of a fashion decade is over, so burn those trousers, and next time, try asking the woman herself. I promise she can actually talk.”

The doctor stares at him for a moment, completely flummoxed, until a dawning realization crosses his face, and he nods understandingly. “The Harvard Psilocybin Project,” he says. “I see. Dr. Leary certainly had some interesting ideas, but there have been a number of issues raised in regard to all that. I can give you some literature. Are you all right?”

“I – what?” It is Flynn’s turn to be baffled by this response, until it hits him that the doctor is convinced, not without reason, that he is tripping the light fantastic on a whole pharmaceutical cornucopia of LSD, magic mushrooms, and God knows what else. After all, it is the sixties. “Look, can I see my wife or not?”

The doctor nods again, puts a sympathetic hand on Flynn’s arm as if to assure him that they will deal with his raging drug problem later, and leads him to the small white-washed room where Lucy has been set up. They can’t really do anything for her that hasn’t been done, but they’ve fixed her bandages and made her comfortable and given her some morphine, and she flashes a tentative smile as Flynn hovers awkwardly in the doorway. Then the doctor shuts it behind him, unfortunately, which leaves them together. Flynn wonders if he could fit through the window. He’d have to do it right in front of her, though, and that seems. . .  well.

Once she’s sure they are alone, Lucy’s smile fades. She stares at Flynn for a long and excruciating moment, as he tries to brace himself for – he has no idea what. Curses, anger, even thrown objects. Finally, all she says, very softly, is, “You son of a bitch.”

That, somehow, stings the worst of all the possible rants she could have gone on. Flynn looks down at the off-white linoleum, which is clearly not going to age well. He looks back up. She is still watching him with that calm, level dark gaze, not overflowing with fury, but still not about to kiss and make up without a damn good explanation, which he currently completely lacks. Finally he says, “I’m sorry.”

Lucy’s lips tighten again, as she brushes a thick lock of hair out of her face. His fingers itch with the sudden need to do it for her. He is not sure if he has been granted permission to approach, however, so he just stands there, looking at her, small in the white bed. He left her. Fell directly off the cliff, and left her behind, and whether or not there is love of some sort between them, somehow, she cannot excuse that at once. Nor should she.

“Cahill,” Lucy says at last, her voice rusty. “What did he. . .  what did he say to you?”

Flynn supposes that this will be a conversation easier to have sitting down, so he moves forward and takes the chair across from the bed. To his surprise (well, it’s only taken weeks, multiple fights, several beat-downs both literal and verbal by Wyatt, her serious injury, his running away to Tokyo, them nearly all being caught by Rittenhouse, and the rest), he finally sees no reason to be anything less than forthcoming with her. Quietly, he tells her what Cahill told him, about her knowing that in this timeline he had supposedly killed the men who murdered Lorena and Iris, the offer made for him to get them back. That he doesn’t know what _has_ happened, isn’t sure if he can have gotten his revenge if he doesn’t remember doing it, and still isn’t sure how all of this was snarled enough to wind up with them married. But if she wants, even apart from anything to do with Rittenhouse, he can find a way to un-twist it. Or, they can just do the simple and logical thing, rather than cooking up another half-baked plot to alter reality, and go their separate ways. If she wants that, if she does not want to be married to this broken and half-functional (at the high end) and damaged and otherwise deficient version of the man she thought she was taking till death do us part, Flynn will more than understand. If there are papers to sign or other legalities to attend to, he will do them. She just has to say so.

Lucy’s lips go tight again. She leans back against her pillows, taking this in, reserving judgment. “I’m sorry,” she says at last, as well. “I should have explained all of this to you, right away, when it became clear that things had changed. How we had ended up together, and what had happened, and. . .  all of it. But I – ”

“This is not your fault.” Startling both of them, Flynn reaches out and catches her hand. “This is not your fault.  It’s mine.  All of it, it’s mine. And I’ve hurt you – I wish I could say unintentionally, but too many times, I meant to, I wanted to – I don’t even know what I wanted, other than to just. . . ” He trails off, staring down at their fingers. “You can slap me now.”

Lucy laughs, more than a little painfully. “I’ll save it until I won’t break my stitches.”

Both of them are quiet then, listening to the tick of the clock on the wall. Then Flynn says, “I wish I could be him. The man you. . .  the man you married. I’m sure he wasn’t worthy of you either, but at least he might have had enough sense to know it.”

Lucy glances at him sidelong, under her eyelashes. After a long pause, she says, “I’m not sure. The man sitting next to me now looks at least a little familiar.”

Flynn is startled. “You. . .  you recognize me?”

“Yes,” Lucy says. Her thumb circles on his palm, her eyes too bright. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.” Flynn’s gaze takes her in, long and soft and slow. “And I recognize you.”

They remain looking at each other for one last moment, and then, at once, they lean forward. Flynn’s thumb traces Lucy’s chin, and he tilts her face up and kisses her lightly and gently, combing through her hair with his free hand. She sighs and puts her arms around his neck with a muffled grunt of pain, and he is careful not to put too much pressure or weight on her side, even as he draws her forward. They turn their heads, deepening the kiss, aware that this is not the time or place to get any more carried away – but both of them can sense the renewed possibility, the spark between them that is more than just their physical attraction to each other, which has been there from the start. This is stronger. Deeper. Truer. Real.

“Well,” Lucy says at last, when they pull back. She giggles breathily, painfully. “Garcia, are you. . . ” She hesitates. “Are you all right?”

Flynn supposes wryly that this is a fair question for her to ask after kissing him, given his recent reactions to such an event. It surprises him, therefore, that he – well – he almost thinks he is. And he isn’t. And he _i_ _s,_ and it’s the most confusing thing he’s ever known. There is a deep, unspeakable, unbearable grief welling in his chest until he can’t breathe, the ever-present ache of missing Lorena and Iris, of wondering forever what might have been. Yet he also has an unexplainable and overwhelming sensation of standing with them on something that looks like a beach, and there is brightness to every side, and Lorena has kissed him, and Iris has hugged him around the waist and told him that she loves him, she always will. And then, even as he watches, his girls take hands and start to walk. He’s not sure to where. Away from him, yes, but it doesn’t feel like defeat, sundering, severance, agony. It feels like. . .  peace.

Flynn only realizes that his eyes have been closed, that he can barely catch his breath, that his world is swimming in tears, when Lucy touches his hand in concern. “Garcia?” she says again, clearly bracing herself for another meltdown on the spectacular side. “Did I. . . ”

“I’m all right.” Flynn heaves down a deep, shuddering breath, and knuckles his hand across his eyes. He’s not, and he is, and he’s not, and he _is,_ and it keeps filling him up, until he gulps in another breath, and another, and marvels what it feels like to do that. “I can – you know. Go.”

Lucy’s tender expression turns exasperated, as if to remind her that she wouldn’t be dealing with Garcia Flynn if he ever drew the correct conclusion from all this. “If you want to,” she says at last, carefully offhand, as if it doesn’t matter. “If you wouldn’t force me to stay married to you, I’m certainly not going to do that either.”

“But. . .  could I?” Flynn doesn’t want to suggest it too quickly, feels like a child trying to be casual about telling their parents what they want for Christmas. “Stay?”

Lucy’s eyes sparkle somewhat more brightly. She glances away. Both of them know that this will not erase everything, wipe the slate clean, take away the weight of his transgressions and his failures, the trust that remains to be rebuilt, if it can be at all. They are fifty years and however many hundreds of miles from home, Rittenhouse is still out there, and the war is not won. This does not mean a happy ending. This does not mean it all goes away.

And yet.

It does mean a beginning.

It does mean a chance.

“Yes,” Lucy whispers at last, her hand coming up to cup his cheek, as they lean together, foreheads touching, sharing their breath, their hope, their _future._ “Yes. You could stay.”

**_(Fin.)_ **


End file.
